This time he fled to Persia, the court of Tissaphernes at Sardis, where he again reconstituted himself, no longer in the coarsecloth cloak of Lacedaemon but the purple robes of a dandy of the court.
Tissaphernes had fallen so beneath his bewitchment, it was told, that he made Alcibiades his tutor in all things and even named his favorite paradise (as the Persians call their deer parks) in his honor, calling it Alkibideion.
At home, Athens lay bankrupt and bereft. All of able body had been called up for the fleet. Only elders and ephebes remained to man the walls. That masculine eros which is the pith and marrow of a nation stood absent. The streets ached for it. The beds of wives lay barren of it.
The polity possessed no champion. Its depleted soil produced only shoots of evil, stunted and malformed. Their posturings upon the political stage disclosed what hollow caricatures they were and made the people lament the more of their bereavement, shorn by plague and war of the bloom of two generations. Reared in such impoverishment, the young grew wild, absent respect for law or decency.
Civility had fled. Age ducked its duties; youth dodged the draft.
Of theater, the comic poets displayed the most vitality, and that only to excoriate those buffoons who dared set themselves up as statesmen. The few of quality who might have served well held back, abandoning the field to those whose greed for prominence was exceeded only by their want of scruple in its pursuit.
Now the people remembered Alcibiades and longed for him.
In memory they revisited the stages of the war, descrying in each his vision and vigor. As a youth none surpassed him in valor.
Come to command, he had harried the foe as no other, compelling them to set their very survival upon one day's battle at Mantinea.
His enterprise alone had called into being the greatest armada in history. Him in command, we would not have lost in Sicily. In command now, we wouldn't be losing in the East. Even the evils he had brought upon the state by his counsel to her foes were cited not as criminal or treasonous, but as evidence of his generalship and audacity, which capacities the city needed desperately and could discover nowhere. Further citation sprang from the roster of the fleet, whose most able commanders-Thrasybulus, Theramenes, Conon, and Thrasyllus-were either intimates of Alcibiades or officers he had sponsored from their debut. Impute what vice you may to his conduct or motive, the demos declared, in statesman's terms he appeared a titan among midgets. In the barbershops and wrestling schools, the commons recalled that Alcibiades had not taken up with the enemy of his own. We ourselves had driven him to it! In our folly we had franchised the knaves and conspirators, jealous of Alcibiades' gifts, to deprive the state of the champion she needed most!
My wife and I attended a comedy by Eupolis in which appeared a player garbed in extravagant style and meant to represent Alcibiades. The playwright had intended to hold this peacock up to ridicule; instead the audience erupted, chanting his name. On the street the actor was mobbed and borne home in triumph.
On walls throughout the city appeared in scrawl, Anakaleson:
“Bring him home.”
It took another year, my grandson, but at last he was recalled, by the men of the Samos fleet, if not yet by the Assembly of Athens-promising Tissaphernes' gold and alliance with Persia.
This was the moment I recollected to Polemides, when the longboat's bumpers touched the timbers of the quay at Samos and, compassed by twenty thousand sailors, soldiers, and marines of Athens, Alcibiades made his way to that elevated platform called the Load-out, where the teamsters back their wagons in to receive the sardiners' catch, and around which now congregated the throngs of the armored divisions and ships' companies, mounting every rooftop and pergola, even the masts of the ships, their spars and warpeaks, beneath the Hill of the Dolphins, to await with hope and trepidation what the repatriated renegade would say.
XXVIII
Twice he began and twice his voice miscarried, so overcome was he by the sight which now enlarged before him. When he failed a third time, a cry burst from those pressed in ranks to the immediate fore. “Again! Again!” men called, this summons reinforced at once by the thousands packing the bowl, the roar of men approving what they see. When the tumult had subsided, Alcibiades recommenced, so softly at first that the heralds, stationed at intervals to relay his words to those higher on the slope, must turn laterally and address their compatriots beside and even below.
“I am not…” Alcibiades began, and, when his voice once more faltered, the heralds picked up that portion and relayed it as is.
“I am not…”
“…not the man I was…”
“…not the man I was…”
“…moments ago, mounting this platform.”
Again the heralds flung the phrase up the amphitheater. At last Alcibiades found his voice and, gesturing his seconds to mount farther, resumed.
“I had meant to cast myself in the role of savior. To present myself before you as one who brings with him, for your deliverance, alliance with that nation whose treasure and naval might will bring the victory which, unaided, you have thus far been unable to achieve. I had planned to address you as a commander and to wring from you a pledge of fidelity for the effort we must now make. But the sight of you…” Again his voice failed. “…the sight of you, my countrymen, breaks my heart. I am struck through with shame. It is not you who must pledge, but I. Not you who must serve, but I. That Athens which exiled me…”
Once more he must re-collect himself, a hand upon the platform stanchion, to recapture his self- command.
“That Athens which exiled me…that Athens I no longer recall.
You are my Athens. You and this.” He gestured to the fleet and the sea and sky. “To you and to this I pledge my allegiance.”
A cheer that was half sob and half cry of approbation ascended from the centered ranks to the outer peripheries. Intended or not, Alcibiades had set in words that grief and affliction that the men, too, felt for their nation, which to them as to their recalled leader seemed remote as Oceanus and dissevered not just from these, her sons, but from her own misplaced and misremembered soul.
“If I have offended the gods, and I have, before you I entreat now their pardon. By their clemency, and to you who have honored me with your faith, I vow that no constraint of heaven or earth, nor the armies of hell itself, will stay me from spending for you and for our country all I possess. My blood, my life, all that I am and own, I pledge to you.”
He stepped back and receded into the press of officers upon the platform.
The amphitheater rang with fire and approbation.
Thrasybulus now spoke, followed by the generals Diomedon and Leon. Individuals among the nautai and infantry addressed the assembly as well. The blood of all was still up from the coup and countercoup which had racked Samos itself just days past, in mirrored requital of the overthrows of state at home. At Athens, all knew, the democracy had been deposed. Acts of terror and assassination had cowed the demos, and that government styling itself the Four Hundred stood in command of the Assembly and the people, having proscribed from political participation all but themselves. Rumors of outrages inflamed the fleet, of violations inflicted upon free citizens, lawless arrests and executions, properties confiscated, the constitution of Cleisthenes and Solon overturned. The men on Samos feared for their families at home and for the nation herself which these tyrants, fresh reports testified, plotted to sell out to the foe to drive a deal to save their own skins.
Now in the flush of Alcibiades' reaccession, the men cried for action and blood. Sail on Athens! Butcher the autocrats! Restore the democracy!
Men of the infantry began to pound their thighs and stamp their soles; sailors on the ships beat their decks and timbers; on the quays the marines' stomping feet made the harbor resound; and even the boys and women set
