have drawn the wrong lesson from that. You say we should live as if the gods were there watching us, even though they are not.”
“And so we should, for our own sake,” Sokrates said.
“But if the gods are not, O best one, why not grab with both hands?” Alkibiades asked. “This being all I have, I intend to make the most of it. And if anyone should stand in the way…” He shrugged. “Too bad.”
The henchman who didn’t like bats said, “Enough of this chatter. Give him the drug. It’s late. I want to go home.”
Alkibiades held up a small black-glazed jar with three horizontal incised grooves showing the red clay beneath the glaze. “Hemlock,” he told Sokrates. “It’s fairly quick and fairly easy-and a lot less messy than what Kritias got.”
“Generous of you,” Sokrates remarked. He stepped forward and reached out to take the jar. Alkibiades’ henchmen let him advance. Why not? If he’d swallow the poison without any fuss, so much the better.
But, when he got within a couple of paces of Alkibiades, he shouted out, “Eleleu!” and flung himself at the younger man. The jar of hemlock smashed on the hard dirt of the courtyard. Alkibiades knew at once he was fighting for his life. Sokrates gave away twenty years, but his stocky, broad-shouldered frame seemed nothing but rock-hard muscle.
He and Alkibiades rolled in the dirt, punching and cursing and gouging and kneeing and kicking each other. This was the pankration, the all-in fight of the Olympic and Panathenaic Games, without even the handful of rules the Games enforced. Alkibiades tucked his head down into his chest. The thumb that would have extracted one of his eyes scraped across his forehead instead.
Back when he was a youth, he’d sunk his teeth into a foe who’d got a good wrestling hold on him. “You bite like a woman!” the other boy had cried.
“No, like a lion!” he answered.
He’d bitten then because he couldn’t stand to lose. He bit now to keep Sokrates from getting a meaty forearm under his chin and strangling him. Sokrates roared. His hot, salty blood filled Alkibiades’ mouth. Alkibiades dug an elbow into his belly, but it might have been made from the marble that had gone into the Parthenon.
Shouting, Alkibiades’ henchmen ran up and started clubbing Sokrates. The only trouble was, they hit Alkibiades nearly as often. Then, suddenly, Sokrates groaned and went limp. Alkibiades scrambled away from him. The hilt of a knife stood in the older man’s back. The point, surely, had reached his heart.
Sokrates’ eyes still held reason as he stared up at Alkibiades. He tried to say something, but only blood poured from his mouth. The hand he’d raised fell back. A stench filled the courtyard; his bowels had let go in death.
“Pheu!” Alkibiades said, just starting to feel his aches and bruises. “He almost did for me there.”
“Who would’ve thought the old blabbermouth could fight like that?” one of his followers marveled, surprise and respect in his voice.
“He was a blabbermouth, sure enough.” Alkibiades bent down and closed the staring eyes. Gently, as a lover might, he kissed Sokrates on the cheek and on the tip of the snub nose. “He was a blabbermouth, yes, but oh, by the gods! he was a man.”
Alkibiades and King Agis of Sparta stood side by side on the speakers’ platform in the Pnyx, the fan-shaped open area west of the agora where the Athenian Assembly convened. Since Alkibiades had taken the rule of Athens into his own hands, this wasn’t really a meeting of the Assembly. But, along with the theater of Dionysos, the Pnyx still made a convenient place to gather the citizens so he-and Agis-could speak to them.
Along with the milling, chattering Athenians, several hundred Spartans who had come up from the Peloponnesos with Agis occupied a corner of the Pnyx. They stood out not only for their red cloaks and shaven upper lips: they stayed in place without movement or talk. Next to the voluble locals, they might almost have been statues.
Nor were they the only Hellenes from other poleis here today. Thebes had sent a delegation to Athens. So had Corinth. So had the Thessalians, from the towns in the north of Hellas proper. And so had the half-wild Macedonians. Their envoys kept staring every which way, especially back toward the Akropolis. Nodding toward them, Alkibiades murmured to Agis, “They haven’t got anything like this up in their backwoods country.”
“We have nothing like this, either,” Agis said. “I doubt whether so much luxury is a good thing.”
“It hasn’t spoiled us or made us soft,” Alkibiades replied. As you have reason to know. He didn’t say that. It hung in the air nonetheless.
“Yes,” Agis said laconically.
What Alkibiades did say was, “We’ve spent enough time-too much time-fighting among ourselves. If Athens and Sparta agree, if the rest of Hellas-and even Macedonia-follows…”
“Yes,” Agis said again. This time, he added, “That is why I have come. This job is worth doing, and Sparta cannot do it alone. Neither can Athens.”
Getting a bit of your own back? Alkibiades wondered. It wasn’t as if Agis were wrong. Alkibiades gestured to a herald who stood on the platform with him and the Spartan. The man stepped up and called in a great voice, “People of Hellas, hear the words of Alkibiades, leader of Hellas, and of Agis, King of Sparta.”
Leader sounded ever so much better than tyrant, even if they amounted to the same thing. Alkibiades took a step forward. He loved having thousands of pairs of eyes on him, where Agis seemed uncomfortable under that scrutiny. Agis, of course, was King because of his bloodline. Alkibiades had had to earn all the attention he’d got. He’d had to, and he’d done it.
Now he said, “People of Hellas, you see before you Athenian and Spartan, with neither one quarreling over who should lead us Hellenes in his direction.” Of course we’re not quarreling, he thought. I’ve won. He wondered how well Agis understood that. Such worries, though, would have to wait for another time. He went on, “For too long, Hellenes have fought other Hellenes. And while we fought among ourselves, while we spent our own treasure and our own blood, who benefited? Who smiled? Who, by the gods, laughed?”
A few of the men in the audience-the more clever, more alert ones-stirred, catching his drift. The rest stood there, waiting for him to explain. Sokrates would have understood. The gouge on Alkibiades’ forehead was only a pink scar now. Sokrates would have said I’m pointing the Athenians in a new direction so they don’t look my way. He would have been right, too. But now he’s dead, and not too many miss him. He wasn’t a nuisance only to me.
Such musing swallowed no more than a couple of heartbeats. Aloud, Alkibiades continued, “In our grandfathers’ day, the Great Kings of Persia tried to conquer Hellas with soldiers, and found they could not. We have men in Athens still alive who fought at Marathon and Salamis and Plataia.”
A handful of those ancient veterans stood in the crowd, white-bearded and bent and leaning on sticks like the last part of the answer to the riddle of the Sphinx. Some of them cupped a hand behind an ear to follow him better. What they’d seen in their long lives!
“Since then, though, Hellenes have battled other Hellenes and forgotten the common foe,” Alkibiades said. “Indeed, with all his gold Great King Dareios II has sought to buy mastery of Hellas, and has come closer to gaining it than Kyros and Xerxes did with their great swarms of men. For enmities among us suit Persia well. She gains from our disunion what she could not with spears and arrows.
“A lifetime ago, Great King Xerxes took Athens and burnt it. We have made it a finer polis, a grander polis, since, but our ashes are yet unavenged. Only when we Hellenes have burnt Persepolis to the ground can we say we are, at last, even with the Persians.”
Some fellow from Halikarnassos had written a great long book about the struggles between Hellenes and Persians. The burning of Athens was the least of it; he’d traced the conflict back even before the days of the Trojan War. What was his name? Alkibiades couldn’t recall. It didn’t matter. People knew Athens had gone up in flames. The rest? Long ago and far away.
Almost everyone in the Pnyx saw where he was going now. A low, excited murmur ran through the crowd. He continued, “We’ve shown one thing, and shown it plainly. Only Hellenes can beat other Hellenes. The Great King knows as much. That’s why he hires mercenaries from Hellas. But if all our poleis pull together, if all our poleis send hoplites and rowers and ships against Persia, not even those traitors can hope to hold us back.
“Persia and the wealth of Persia will be ours. We will have new lands to rule, new lands to settle. We won’t have to expose unwanted infants anymore. They will have places where they can live. The Great King’s treasury will
