citizenship to his sons and dispatching to his court poets, musicians, even hairdressers. Toward the end, reports claimed, such irregularities infiltrated Alcibiades' speech as “the alchemy of acclaim” and “the plain of intercession,” the latter constituting, he averred, that field upon which gods and mortals mingle and convene. He warranted to rule by
“commanding the mythos” and designated his philosophy “the politics of arete.”
He began to refer to himself in the third person, they said, and invoke his own spirit as if it were a god. Sorcerers and warlocks sat to each hand. He declared it achievable to stop the sun. His flesh he mutilated, some recited, scorning the stuff as but a mantle to transcend or discard. I witnessed him sacrifice all night, more than once, to Hecate and Necessity. They say Timandra was his mentor in such deviation, a succubus herself and no woman but hellspawn.
In thrall to her, men alleged, he debarred all from his society to dream and convoked wizards to divine these phantoms' import.
He claimed once that he could fly, and had soared to Phthia on wings of quicksilver, conferring there with Nestor and Achilles.
In spring he sent me to Macedonia to procure masts and ships' timbers. There chance set in my path Berenice, Lion's camp woman, by heaven's grace in sheltered circumstance, wife of a teamster. She had endured unimaginable sufferings since Syracuse, yet through all had preserved her lover's historia. This she restored to me, with the chest, the same which holds it now, carved by her new husband. I liked the fellow. He was an unplaned plank, much as his predecessor. He had come from work “down south,” trucking goods in secret out of Attica. Athens' own generals were caching their movables, he reported, so certain were they of the ruin to come.
I was still there, at Pella in Macedonia, when report came of the final calamity at Aegospotami. In the days before the battle, after Lysander had taken Lampsacus and drawn up his two hundred and ten battleships across the strait from Conon's hundred and eighty, he came down from his castle, did Alcibiades, to the strand where his countrymen's fleet lay. He was garbed in fox skins, they said, hair unbound and falling to midback. Forty horsemen of the Odrysians provided his lifeguard, accoutered more savagely than he. He would bring fifty thousand horse and foot, he pledged, and strike Lysander by land, if Athens' generals would ferry him.
Lampsacus he would recapture for them, entreating nothing. But they drove him off.
“You command here no longer, Alcibiades.” This was the speech of the general Philocles, that villain whose concept of the warrior's code included putting forward the motion, carried so infamously by the Assembly at Athens, to strike off the hand of every enemy sailor taken captive.
Thus was Alcibiades, for the third and final time, banished from the society of his countrymen. Sixteen months later, as that party which bore his murder trekked in his trace upon this selfsame sand, Endius with sorrow remarked that derangement which was at once Alcibiades' curse and genius, and to which, unforswearing, he held true all his life.
“Nations are too puny for him. His self-conception supersedes statehood, and they are dwarves in his eyes who will not step in his train off the precipice of the world. He is correct of course; that is why he must be made away with.
For his vision is the future, which the present uncompelled may not now, or ever, abide.”
XLIX
The evolution of our tale [Polemides continued] now mandates address of that defeat which broke our nation. It would make a better story to appoint it a mighty conflagration, with tides of battle alternating between throw and overthrow and the issue in doubt to the ultimate hour. As you know, it had been lost years before.
Give Lysander credit. This victory, devoid of honor, was yet informed by masterful cunning and forbearance, evincing such discipline and self-restraint, and such shrewd assessment of his enemy's weaknesses, as to render the event itself anticlimax.
Lysander waited; the fruit fell. None may take this from him, that he gained for his country and her allies that triumph which no other had proved capable of securing over thrice nine years of war.
I remained in Thrace through much of the winter preceding the battle. We heard of Lysander's agents overthrowing Miletus, putting all democrats to the sword. He took Iasus in Caria, an Athenian ally, executing all the males of military age, selling the women and children into slavery, and razing the city.
During that final winter Alcibiades suffered a serious fall from a horse. For months he could not walk; to rise from his chair left him white with pain. Savage peoples possess no patience for incapacity.
Medocus took his army and decamped; Seuthes followed. The prince, who should have hated Alcibiades for his offense with Alexandra, proved his most steadfast upholder. He had him borne by litter to Pactye, sent him a falconer, beasts for sacrifice, and his own doctor. He gave him five towns for his meat, wine, and necessities. When asked what he lacked for sustenance of his spirit, Alcibiades requested three regiments, which he put under Mantitheus, the younger Druses, and Canocles. These he trained as a type of mobile elite unknown heretofore, who could both row and fight as heavy infantry, each packing his own kit and armor, independent of squires or commissariat. When Medocus made sport of these as inconsequential numerically, Alcibiades declared he could triple their ranks in a month and not put out a penny. He simply outfitted them in colors of war and marched them through the Iron Mountains. So many were the youths drawn by the splendor of this outfit that he raised ten thousand and must turn away ten more.
At last in the spring his back was better. He could ride. The Thracian clans gather at the rising of Arcturus, and at this festival Alcibiades competed in the horse trials and took the crown, aged forty-six. I believe this put him back in fettle. Lysander had captured Lampsacus, so close across the strait you could see it on a haze less day. Now to the foreshore beneath Alcibiades' stronghold, summoned by what perverse destiny, came Athens' final fleet, commanded by Conon, Adeimantus, Menander, Philocles, Tydeus, and Cephisodotus.
Polemides' report of this action was necessarily abridged, forasmuch as he himself had been absent, dispatched to Macedonia for ships' timbers, and because he addressed one, myself, already amply acquainted with the consequence. For your sake, my grandson, let me “take up the line” then and flesh out that which our client had passed over in his account addressed to me.
Aegospotami lies dead across the Hellespont from Lampsacus.
It is not a harbor, barely an anchorage. There are two small hamlets, no market. Wind is out of the northeast, steady and strong; a rip current runs adjacent the strand, making it difficult to launch and more so to beach, as the vessels of course must put in stern-first.
The beach itself exceeds ten furlongs, abundant extent for the ships and camp for thirty thousand men. These, however, must hike four or five miles to Sestos to secure their dinner. There is good water at Aegospotami except at tide when the creeks run salt; one must track inland a quarter mile to fresh. It seemed folly to encamp on this inhospitable spit, with the allied city of Sestos so near. Yet to withdraw to that site, as many urged, including Alcibiades, would be to concede Lampsacus to the enemy, and this the generals dared not, recollecting the fate of their predecessors after Arginousai. The commanders burned to draw Lysander to battle. Whatever Aegospotami's liabilities, at least it sat square across from the foe. Lysander could not slip away; sooner or later he must come out and tangle.
Here, from the Council inquest in the aftermath, this affidavit of my old mate Bruise, who served aboard Hippolyta upon that strand:
“He come down from his castle. We all turned out, crowding about him. It was Alcibiades, all right, but gotten up like a savage.
You know, sirs, how he took on the colors of them he slept with.
The generals wouldn't let him address the troops, but every word he spoke spread like fire through the camp. He didn't say nothing that the men hadn't heard over and over: that this patch was a death trap, put back to Sestos. You're vulnerable, he said, scattering across miles to get your grub. What if Lysander puts the rush on? But we couldn't vacate, or Lysander'd scoot. What would come next, but the Salaminia putting in from Athens, calling the generals home to be tried for dereliction? We all knew how that would end.
