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.
“I can't take this anymore. I can't take it!”
His hair was tangled and matted with sweat. He paced barefoot and bare-chested, appearing, one could not but envisage, as Achilles in his tent before Troy, storming in rage at his maltreatment at the hands of Agamemnon. At one point his shoulder brushed a stack of crockery, sending several vessels crashing to the floor. “Let them charge this to my account as well!”
To deflect Alcibiades' attention onto less doleful matters, an officer presented several documents of the Admiralty which required Alcibiades' approval and which confirmed the readiness of the fleet to sail. This sight seemed only to aggravate the man's distress.
“Who is to blame for this?” He wrung his fingers through his hair. “None but myself. No one but me.”
A number of ship's captains had entered through the wharfside portals and now collected about their commander, attesting their loyalty. Tears stood in Alcibiades' eyes; for a moment it seemed he would be overcome. Then, regarding the dismay upon his colleagues' faces, he was struck by the comic aspect and burst into a laugh.
“Cheer up, my friends; our enemies have stabbed me only with the pen. I bleed ink, not blood.”
He strode onto the wharf, followed by the officers, and dove from its planks into the bay. A cheer arose; hands hauled him dripping forth. A cloak was set about his shoulders. The men surrounded him.
“To hell with these jackals,” a captain named Eurylochus spat.
“Let the sea wash their lies from our backs.”
Another trierarch, Patrocles, seconded this with passion. Forget the trial, he urged Alcibiades, embark now with the fleet. “God made no anodyne like victory.”
Alcibiades drew up, clearly aware of the resonance of this man's name and its forebear of glory, the beloved companion of Achilles.
“Patrocles, my friend. Is your name an omen? Will my wrath, as Achilles', be the cause of your death and my own?”
The moment hung like a sword from a strand. Then, from the men as one:
“Sicily!”
Alcibiades regarded them. “Shall we sail, brothers, with enemies at our backs?”
“Sicily!” his mates resounded, more ardent.
There beyond his shoulder the vessels of the fleet awaited in their slips or rode to anchor, line after line filling the harbor, while he whose will and ambition had summoned this armada into existence and elevated it to its pitch of readiness drew up gravely, weighing in his heart this decision which necessity and his own fate had forced upon him and his country.
“Sicily!” the officers cried, and again: “Sicily!”
Book IV
XVIII
Before Sicily [Polemides resumed] I had never fought as a marine. The sea fighter's skills were new to me. I knew nothing of two-and-ones or concentrics, the breakthrough or the cutback; I had never thrown a javelin from a kneeling position or dashed forward along a trireme deck, that my weight and my comrades' decline the drive of the ram and cause her to rip the foe more lethally beneath the waterline.
I have had a nightmare here in prison, the same repeated eve upon eve. In the dream I am in Sicily, the Great Harbor of Syracuse.
Of our hundred and forty-four warships, the Athenian and Corcyrean fleets combined, under fifty remain, fit to fight. These have fled to the strand beneath the Olympieum and are thrown up in disorder behind the palisade. Syracusan and Corinthian warships drive at us; the axes of their marines assault the towers bearing the massive drop-weight “dolphins,” while their archers sling ironheads upon us in the water.
Out in the harbor our ships are burning and going down. Along the shore the enemy infantry waits. Where I am, on the palisade, the foe keeps coming. Ram and back water, ram and back water.
These sons of whores are good. Even after ten hours, their blades bite in unison. I am flung rearward into the backwash. The surface is choked with arrow-shafts, marine javelins, and shivered oars.
My strength fails. A ship passes over. I'm going down for good when I wake in terror.
It has been my experience that in certain instances of battle or other moments of extreme peril, reality as it is normally experienced becomes supplanted by a dreamlike state in which events seem to unfold with a stately deliberateness, a retardation almost leisurely, and we ourselves stand apart as if observers of our own peril. A sense of wonder pervades all; one becomes vividly, preternaturally aware, not alone of danger but of beauty as well.
He sees, and keenly appreciates, such subtleties as the play of light upon water, even such surface incarnadined with the blood of comrades dearly loved, or his own. One is able to observe to himself, “I am going to die now,” and absorb this with equanimity.
