Heroes: Saviours, Traitors and Supermen

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When the war is over, when the fabled towers of Troy are shattered, its riches plundered and its people slaughtered or enslaved, when the Greeks at last have sailed away, Poseidon and Apollo throw down the massive rampart that protected the Greek ships. The proper sacrifices were not made before building began. The prodigious wall is an impious defacement of the landscape. The gods call upon the waters of the earth to wash it away. Rivers in flood, torrential rain, the sea’s breakers, all batter against it until there is nothing left of that desperate labour. Poseidon ‘made all smooth (#litres_trial_promo) along the rip of the Hellespont/And piled the endless beaches deep in sand again’. This war, the most celebrated in human history, is to leave no trace upon the face of the earth.

‘You’d think me (#litres_trial_promo) hardly sane,’ says Apollo to a fellow god, ‘if I fought with you for the sake of wretched mortals./Like leaves, no sooner flourishing, full of the sun’s fire,/Feeding on earth’s gifts, then they waste away and die.’ Human affairs, viewed sub specie aeternitatis, are of gnat-like insignificance. Human aspirations are absurd, and human lifespan as short as summer’s lease.

For Homer’s heroes there is no sublime afterlife to compensate for this one’s brevity. The souls of the dead survive, but once parted from their bodies their existence is shadowy and mournful. When a warrior dies his soul goes ‘winging down (#litres_trial_promo) to the House of Death,/ Wailing its fate, leaving his manhood far behind,/His young and supple strength’. Physical beauty, the marvellous vigour and grace of the human body, these are life’s splendours. The pleasures of the intellect, of stratagem and story telling and debate, are prized as well, but they too are a part of corporeal life, dependent for their very existence on ear and tongue and brain. ‘In Death’s strong house (#litres_trial_promo),’ says Achilles, ‘there is something left/A ghost, a phantom – true, but not real breath of life.’

Achilles and his fellows treat bodies, alive or dead, with reverence and tenderness – or with a violence that deliberately outrages the body’s acknowledged sanctity. More than half of the fighting described in the Iliad consists of battles over corpses, as a warrior’s enemies try to strip his fallen body of armour (which, poignantly, is far more durable than its wearers) while his comrades struggle to defend him from such posthumous indignity, giving their lives sometimes to save one already dead. It is the flesh that is precious: without it, the spirit is of little consequence. Funerals are awesome, long-drawn-out, and prodigally expensive. Funeral games honour the dead by celebrating the survivors’ bodily strength and swiftness and skill, insisting, even in commemoration of one who has lost it, that the breath of life is of ineffable value. And once gone it is irretrievable. Achilles refuses all Agamemnon’s proffered presents, and he would refuse them even if they were as numberless as the sand; for all the world’s wealth is worth less than his little time in the sun. ‘A man’s life’s breath (#litres_trial_promo) cannot come back again once it slips through a man’s clenched teeth.’

But just as the discarnate spirit is a sad and paltry thing, so the inanimate flesh is gross and open to the most squalid abuse. The dignity of embodied man is exquisitely precarious. ‘Oh my captains (#litres_trial_promo),’ cries Patroclus, grieving over the beleaguered Greeks. ‘How doomed you are … to glut with your shining fat/The wild dogs of battle here in Troy.’ The Homeric warriors, who have lived for over nine years by a battlefield, the horrors of war perpetually before their eyes, are haunted by the knowledge that the strong arms, the tireless shoulders, the springy knees in which they take such pride, are also so much grease to be melted and swallowed up by the impartial earth, so many joints of meat. In one of this harsh poem’s most desolating passages King Priam foresees his own death. ‘The dogs before my doors (#litres_trial_promo)/Will eat me raw … The very dogs/I bred in my own halls to share my table … mad, rabid at heart they’ll lap their master’s blood.’ Death cancels all relationship, annuls all status. ‘The dogs go at the grey head and the grey beard/And mutilate the genitals.’ Even a king like Priam, his life’s breath gone, is reduced to unlovely matter, defenceless, disgusting. When Zeus sees Achilles’ immortal horses weeping for Patroclus he apologizes to them for having sent them to live with mortals, whose inevitable destiny is so pitiful, so degrading. ‘There is nothing (#litres_trial_promo) alive more agonized than man.’

There is one way to salvage something from the brutal fact of death. To the Homeric warriors it seemed that the fearless confrontation of violence with more violence might be a way to transform themselves from destructible things into indestructible memories. A man without courage is mere evanescent matter. ‘You can all turn (#litres_trial_promo) to earth and water – rot away,’ Menelaus tells the Greeks when none among them is brave enough to take up Hector’s challenge to single combat. But a man ready to go out and meet death cheats it. It is on the battlefield, as Homer tells us over and over again, ‘that men win glory’, and for the ancients the winning of glory had a precise and urgent purpose. ‘Ah my friend (#litres_trial_promo),’ says Sarpedon to his comrade, ‘if you and I could escape this fray and live forever, never a trace of age, immortal,/I would never fight on the front lines again/Or command you to the field where men win fame./But now as it is, the fates of death await us/ … and not a man alive/Can flee them or escape – so in we go for the attack!/Give our enemy glory or win it for ourselves.’ Only glory could palliate the grim inexorability of death. The man who attained it distinguished himself in life from the mass of his fellows, and when he died he escaped oblivion.

Achilles’ surpassing beauty is precious not because of any erotic advantage it may give him but because, along with his strength and prowess, it renders him outstanding. His celebrity is profoundly important to him, as it would be to any of his peers. It is not frivolous vanity that makes him prize it so. A man who is praised and honoured while he is alive may be remembered even after his body is reduced to ashes and his spirit has gone down into the dark. To be forgotten is to die utterly. To Agamemnon, facing defeat as the Trojans close on the Greek ships, the most terrible aspect of the fate awaiting him and his army is that, once they have been massacred so far from home, their memory will be ‘blotted out’. The only moment in the Iliad when Achilles shows fear is when the River Xanthus comes close to overpowering him, to sweeping him away ignominiously ‘like some boy (#litres_trial_promo), some pig-boy’ and threatens to bury him in slime and silt so deep that his bones will never be found, and no fine burial mound will ensure his lasting fame.

‘Remember (#litres_trial_promo),’ says the mysterious wise woman Diotima to Socrates in Plato’s Symposium, ‘that the love of fame and the desire to win a glory that shall never die have the strangest effects on people. For this even more than for their children they are ready to run risks, spend their substance, endure every kind of hardship and sacrifice their lives.’ Achilles, she goes on, would surely not have given his life had he not believed that his ‘courage would live for ever in men’s memory’. Pindar, writing a generation before Plato, rejoiced that in the hero’s lifetime ‘the voice of poets (#litres_trial_promo) made known … the new excellence of Achilles’, that in his death ‘song did not abandon him’, that the Muses themselves chanted dirges around his pyre, and that the gods ordained that he, or rather his memory, should be tended and sustained by them for ever more.

St Augustine understood the ancients’ craving for fame, and what seemed to him their over-valuation of the ‘windy praise (#litres_trial_promo) of men’. Looking back from the standpoint of one to whom Christ’s death had offered the hope of heaven, he wrote forgivingly of the folly with which they tried to extend and to give significance to their pathetically finite lives. ‘Since there was no eternal life for them what else were they to love apart from glory, whereby they chose to find even after death a sort of life on the lips of those who sang their praise?’

That windy afterlife could be attained by killing. Hector, challenging Ajax to single combat, promises to return his victim’s body, should he kill him, so that the Greeks can build a burial mound: ‘And some day (#litres_trial_promo) one will say, one of the men to come,/Steering his oar-swept ship across the wine-dark sea,/“There’s the mound of a man who died in the old days,/One of the brave whom glorious Hector killed”. So they will say, some day, and my fame will never die.’ Better still, it could be achieved by being killed in battle. In the Odyssey Achilles’ shade and that of Agamemnon meet in the Underworld. Agamemnon who, alive, insisted so vehemently on his supremacy, now defers to the other, paying tribute to Achilles’ glorious end. Rank confers honour, but only a soldier’s death brings glory. Murdered on his return to Mycenae by his wife Clytemnestra, Agamemnon, as the victim of a squalid and abhorrent crime, is degraded in perpetuity. He wishes, and Achilles agrees that he is right to do so, that he had been killed at Troy. Enviously, he describes Achilles’ funeral, the eighteen days of unbroken mourning and sombre ceremony, the tears, the dirges, the burnt offerings, the games, the long cortège of men in battle armour, the resounding roar that went up when the pyre was lit, the great tomb built over the hero’s bones. ‘Even in death (#litres_trial_promo) your name will never die … /Great glory is yours, Achilles,/For all time, in the eyes of all mankind.’

The gods held to their side of the bargain Achilles made. His fame has yet to die. For the Greeks of the classical era, for the Romans after them, and – after a lapse of nearly a thousand years during which the Greek language was all but forgotten in the West – for every educated European gentleman (and a few ladies) from the Renaissance until the beginning of the twentieth century, the two Homeric epics were the acknowledged foundations of Western culture, and ‘the best of the Achaeans’ the prototypical hero. Even now, as this book goes to press, a new film version of the Troy story is being advertised, one in which Brad Pitt, described as Hollywood’s handsomest actor, plays Achilles. It is a role many illustrious men have coveted.

In 334 BC Alexander, the 22-year-old King of Macedonia, already remarkable for his daring and his vast ambition, chose to make his first landfall in Asia on the beach traditionally held to be the one where, some nine centuries earlier, the Greeks’ black ships were drawn up throughout the ten harrowing years that they laid siege to Troy. Alexander slept every night with a copy of the Iliad, which he called his ‘journey-book (#litres_trial_promo) of excellence in war’, beneath his pillow along with a dagger. He claimed that his mother was descended from Achilles. He encouraged his courtiers to address him by Achilles’ name. As his fleet neared the shore he dressed himself in full armour and took the helm of the royal trireme. Before embarking on his world-subduing campaign, Alexander had come to pay tribute to his model.

At Troy, at this period a mere village, he refused the citizens’ offer of the instrument on which Paris (also known as Alexander) used to serenade Helen. ‘For that lyre (#litres_trial_promo),’ he told them, ‘I care little. I have come for the lyre of Achilles, with which, as Homer says, he would sing of the prowess and glories of brave men.’ As Achilles had sung to himself in his tent, evoking the reputation of the heroes dead and gone among whom he wished to be numbered, so Alexander, at this momentous starting-point, solemnly honoured his great forerunner. Stripped naked, and anointed with oil, he ran with his companions to lay a garland on Achilles’ tomb.

That a young Hellenic king ambitious of military conquest in Asia and intent on creating for himself the reputation of a warrior to compare with those of the legendary past should choose Achilles as model and patron is perhaps predictable. But a generation earlier a great man of a very different stamp had also invoked his name. In 399 BC the 70-year-old philosopher Socrates was put on trial in Athens, accused of refusing to recognize the city’s gods, of introducing new deities, and of corrupting the young. He was summoned before a court consisting of five hundred of his peers and invited to make his defence. He proceeded, not to answer the charges against him, but to make a mock both of them and of his chief accusers. Then, midway through his defence (as it was written down by Plato some years after the event), his tone altered. For a while, his famous irony and his provocative sangfroid alike were laid aside. He was unpopular, he said, he realized that, and he had known for some time that he risked incurring a capital charge. But to one who might ask him why, in that case, he persisted in a course that was so evidently irritating to the authorities he said that he would answer: ‘You are mistaken (#litres_trial_promo), my friend, if you think that a man who is worth anything ought to spend his time weighing up the prospects of life and death. He has only one thing to consider in performing any action; that is whether he is acting justly or unjustly.’ If he were offered acquittal – and with it his life – on the condition that he would refrain in future from the kind of philosophical enquiry he was accustomed to practise, he would refuse the offer. ‘I am not going (#litres_trial_promo) to alter my conduct, not even if I have to die a hundred deaths.’

There was an uproar in the court. Unabashed, Socrates reiterated his defiance, alluding to the passage in the Iliad when Thetis tells Achilles that if he re-enters the fighting he will die soon, for he is doomed to fall shortly after Hector. ‘“Let me die (#litres_trial_promo) forthwith,” said [Achilles], “… rather than remain here by the beaked ships to be mocked, a burden on the ground.” Do you suppose that he gave a thought to death and danger?’ The quotation was inaccurate but the sentiment was authentically Homeric. Achilles, like Socrates after him, refused to be a burden on the earth, a mere lump of animated matter, obedient to the stupid or immoral decrees of others. Wherever he went, Socrates told his judges, established authority would persecute him if he continued to question it, which he would never cease to do. A life in which he was not free to think and speak as he pleased was ‘not worth living’. To die was preferable.

A vote was called. Socrates was found guilty by 280 votes to 220. He spoke again. His accusers demanded the death penalty. According to Athenian law it was for the defendant to propose another, lesser punishment. Socrates believed, and most historians agree with him, that if he had asked for banishment it would have been granted. He disdained to do so. The sentence of death was voted on, and approved by a substantially larger majority than the verdict (indicating that there were more people in court who wanted Socrates dead than there were people who believed him to be guilty as charged). He spoke again, asserting that he was content because the satisfaction of acting rightly, according to one’s own lights of reason and moral discrimination, was so great as to eclipse any suffering: ‘Nothing can harm (#litres_trial_promo) a good man either in life or after death.’ Defiant, courageous, intransigent, he had proved himself equal to the example he had invoked in court, Achilles.

A man of violence who admitted himself to be easily bested in debate, whose passions were hectic, and whose thought processes were frequently incoherent, who spoke his mind at all times and despised subterfuge, Homer’s Achilles was in many ways a bizarre model for the philosopher who strove unceasingly to subject emotion to reason, who was a master of irony and a brilliant manipulator of men’s minds. But the classical philosopher and the legendary warrior were, for all their differences, soul-mates. Alexander, world-conqueror in the making, sought to associate himself with Achilles’ youthful valour and invincibility, with the glittering, deadly warrior whose brilliance rivalled the splendour of the midday sun. But when Socrates, the impecunious, pug-nosed, incorrigible old worrier of complacent authority and scourge of dishonest thinking, claimed Achilles as a predecessor he did so in appreciation of the fact that Achilles was more than a killer of unparalleled charisma, that he could be taken as a model in peace as well as in war, as one who insisted that his life should be worthy of his own tremendous estimation of his own value as an individual, and who would pay the price required to invest that life with significance and dignity, even if the price were life itself. Socrates defied convention and eventually fell foul of the law because he would submit to no other dictates than those of his intellect and of his private daimon. Achilles rebelled against Agamemnon’s overlordship, and looked on relentless while his countrymen were slaughtered rather than compromise his honour. Both were stubborn, self-destructive, exasperating to their enemies and the dismay of their friends. Both insisted on valuing their own personal integrity higher than any service or disservice they might do the community. Both have been condemned for their culpable pride, and venerated for their courage and their superb defiance.

In his tent at the furthest end of the Greek encampment, sworn to inaction, isolated by his own rage and by others’ fear of it, Achilles set himself at odds with the fractured, fudged-together thing that society necessarily is. Any human group, be it a family, a city, an army or a nation, depends for its continued existence on its members’ willingness to bend and yield, to compromise, to accept what is possible rather than demand what is perfect; but a society that loses sight of the standard of perfection is a dangerously unstable one. From the accommodating to the corrupt is an easy slide. Achilles and others who, like him, have stood firm, however wilfully and self-destructively, on a point of principle, have generally been revered by onlookers and by posterity as wholeheartedly as they have been detested by the authorities they challenge. ‘Become who you are! (#litres_trial_promo)’ wrote Pindar, Socrates’ contemporary. It is not an easy injunction. For a man to become who he is takes a ruthless lack of concern for others’ interests, monstrous egoism, and absolute integrity. Achilles, who hated a dissembler worse than the gates of death, had the courage to make the attempt, and so died.

II ALCIBIADES (#ulink_08480a80-7462-5075-8db2-0542f097c8af)

IN 405 BC the Peloponnesian War, which had lasted for a quarter of a century and set the entire Hellenic world at odds, ended with the comprehensive defeat of the Athenians at Aegosopotami on the Hellespont. The fleet on which Athens depended for its security and its food supply was destroyed. Lysander, commanding the victorious Spartans, had all the defeated Athenians troops slaughtered. The ship bearing the news reached the Athenian port of Piraeus at nightfall. The wailing began down in the harbour. As the news was passed from mouth to mouth, it spread gradually all along the defensive walls linking city to sea until it reached the darkened streets around the Acropolis and the whole city was heard to cry out like an enormous beast in its agony. ‘That night (#litres_trial_promo),’ wrote Xenophon, ‘no one slept. They mourned for the lost, but more still for their own fates.’

The Athenians had good cause to mourn. Within a matter of months they had been blockaded and starved into submission. Their democracy had been replaced by a murderous puppet government, an oligarchy known as the Thirty Tyrants. They lived in fear – of the Spartans who were now their overlords, and of each other, for every formerly prominent person was under suspicion, informers were so active that none dared trust his neighbour, and Critias, leader of the Thirty, ‘began to show (#litres_trial_promo) a lust for putting people to death’. And yet, according to Plutarch, ‘In the midst (#litres_trial_promo) of all their troubles a faint glimmer of hope yet remained, that the cause of Athens could never be utterly lost so long as Alcibiades was alive.’

Alcibiades! The name was a charm, and its workings, like all magical processes, were beyond reason. The man on whom the Athenians, in their extremity, pinned their hopes was one whom they had three times rejected, a traitor who had worked so effectively for their enemies that there were those who held him personally responsible for Athens’ downfall. Exiled from Athens for the second time, he was now living among the barbarians in Thrace. There, in a heavily fortified stronghold, with a private army at his command, he led the life of an independent warlord or bandit chief. There was no substantial reason to suppose that he could do anything for the Athenian democracy, and no certainty that he would wish to help even were it in his power to do so. And yet, as the first-century historian Cornelius Nepos noted, Alcibiades was a man from whom miracles, whether malign or beneficent, had always been expected: ‘The people thought (#litres_trial_promo) there was nothing he could not accomplish.’

Plato, who knew Alcibiades, elaborates in the Republic what he calls a ‘noble lie (#litres_trial_promo)’, a fable in which he suggests that all men are made from earth, but that in a few the earth has been mixed with gold, rendering them inherently superior to their fellow men, and fit to wield power. This lie, Plato suggests, is a politically useful one. In his ideal republic, he would like to ‘indoctrinate’ the mass of the people with a belief in it, in order that they might be the more easily governed. It would probably not be hard to do so. The belief that some people are innately different from and better than others pervades all pagan mythology and classical legend and surfaces as well in folk tales and fairy stories. The foundling whose white skin proclaims her noble birth, the favoured younger son who survives his ordeals assisted by the birds and beasts who recognize his privileged status, the emperor-to-be whose birth is attended by tremendous omens – all spring, as Plato’s men of gold do, from a profoundly anti-egalitarian collective belief in, and yearning for, the existence of a naturally occurring elite – exceptional beings capable of leading their subordinates to victory, averting evil and playing saviour, or simply providing by their prodigious feats a spectacle capable of exhilarating and inspiring the humdrum multitude. In Alcibiades the Athenians found their golden man.

That Alcibiades was indeed an extraordinary person is well attested. All his life he had a quality, which his contemporaries were at a loss to define or explain, that inspired admiration, fear, and vast irrational hopes. ‘No one ever (#litres_trial_promo) exceeded Alcibiades’, wrote Nepos, ‘in his faults or in his virtues.’ His contemporaries recognized in him something demonic and excessive that both alarmed and excited them. Plutarch likened him to the fertile soil (#litres_trial_promo) of Egypt, so rich that it brings forth wholesome drugs and poisons in equally phenomenal abundance. He was a beauty and a bully, an arrogant libertine and a shrewd diplomat, an orator as eloquent when urging on his troops as when he was lying to save his life, a traitor three or four times over with a rare and precious gift (essential to a military commander) for winning his men’s love. There was a time when his prodigious energy and talents terrified many Athenians, who feared that a man so exceptional must surely aim to make himself a tyrant; but in their despair they looked to him as a redeemer.

His adult life coincided almost exactly with the duration of the Peloponnesian War, which began in 431 BC, when he was nineteen, and ended with the fall of Athens in 405, the year before his death. Throughout that period, with brief interludes, the Spartans and their allies (known collectively as the Peloponnesians) struggled against the Athenians, with their allies and colonies, for ascendancy while lesser powers repeatedly shifted allegiance, tilting the balance of power first one way, then another. Sparta was a rigidly conservative state with a curious and ancient constitution in which two hereditary kings ruled alongside, and were outranked by, a council of grandees, the ephors, selected from a handful of noble families. Spartan colonies had oligarchic governments imposed upon them. Athens was a democracy, and founded democracies in its colonies. The war had an ideological theme, but it was also a competition between two aggressively expansionist rival powers for political and economic dominance of the eastern Mediterranean world. From 412 onwards it was complicated by the intervention of the Persians, whose empire dwarfed both the Hellenic alliances. Athens’ successful colonization of the Aegean islands and the coastal regions of Asia Minor deprived the Persian Great King of revenue. His regional governors, the satraps, sided first with the Spartans, later with Athens, in an attempt to re-establish control of the area. Alcibiades, who had Odysseus’ cunning as well as Achilles’ brilliance, was a skilful actor in the complex, deadly theatre of the war. As a general he was swift, subtle and daring. As a diplomat he proved himself to be a confidence trickster of genius.

In his youth he was the golden boy of Athens’ golden age. His family were rich, aristocratic (they claimed descent from Homer’s Nestor), and well connected not only in Athens but all over the Greek world. In constitutional terms every free male citizen of Athens was equal to every other, but in practice the nobility still dominated the government as they did the city’s economic and social life. Homer’s characters take it for granted that a person’s best qualities are inherited. ‘No mean men (#litres_trial_promo) could sire sons like you’, Menelaus tells two handsome young strangers (he’s right – their fathers are both kings). Most of Alcibiades’ contemporaries would have made the same assumption. ‘The splendour (#litres_trial_promo) running in the blood has much weight,’ wrote Pindar. When Alcibiades was still a child his father was killed in battle and he was taken to live in the household of his guardian Pericles, who was for thirty years effective ruler of Athens. He could scarcely have been given a better start in life.

Nature was as kind to him as fortune had been. Like Achilles, he was dazzlingly beautiful. To Plutarch, writing five hundred years after his death, his loveliness was still so much of a byword that ‘we need say (#litres_trial_promo) no more about it, than that it flowered at each season of his growth in turn’. In the homoerotic society of Athens such good looks made him an instant celebrity. As a boy, he was ‘surrounded and pursued (#litres_trial_promo) by many admirers of high rank … captivated by the brilliance of his youthful beauty’. Whether he actually had sexual relations with any of them is unclear, but gossip maintained that he did. If so, few of his contemporaries would therefore have considered him either immoral or effete. Aeschylus, in the generation before Alcibiades, and Plato, his contemporary, both believed Achilles to be Patroclus’ lover (something Homer does not suggest), but neither of them thought any the less of him for it. On the contrary, Plato’s Phaedrus cites Achilles’ ‘heroic choice (#litres_trial_promo) to go and rescue Patroclus’ as an example of the way in which love can ennoble a man, earning him ‘the extreme admiration of the gods’.

Among those smitten by Pericles’ ward was Socrates, who told a disciple that the two great loves (#litres_trial_promo) of his life were philosophy and Alcibiades. The philosopher had gathered around himself a group of aristocratic young men, non-paying students of whom Alcibiades was certainly not the most serious but of whom he was the most highly favoured. Plato (another of them) testifies that the relationship between the ugly middle-aged philosopher and the radiantly beautiful teenager remained chaste, but it surely was, at least on Socrates’ part, physically motivated. When in Plato’s Protagoras, which is set at a time when Alcibiades was about fifteen, Socrates claims to have become so engrossed in a philosophical discussion as to have briefly forgotten Alcibiades altogether, his friend teases him by saying ‘Surely you did not (#litres_trial_promo) find anyone else of greater beauty there. No! not in all our city.’ Alcibiades’ beauty marked him out, just as Achilles’ had done, as a superior being. In the second century ad the Roman Emperor Hadrian, a connoisseur and devotee of male beauty as ardent as any Athenian, set up an image of Alcibiades in Parian marble and commanded that an ox should be sacrificed to him every year. In his lifetime as well, his looks made him an object, not only of lust, but also of worship. And lovely as he was, his charm was as potent as his physical attractions. His personal magnetism, according to Plutarch, ‘was such that (#litres_trial_promo) no disposition could wholly resist it, and no character remain unaffected’. The events of his extraordinary career confirm the claim.

As a young man Alcibiades was showy, extravagant, outrageous. He wore his hair as long as a woman’s, spoke with a provocative lisp and strutted through the marketplace trailing his long purple robe. He was a ringleader, a setter of trends. Eupolis reports that he started a fashion for drinking in the morning. When he appeared in a new style of sandal all his contemporaries had copies made, and called them ‘Alcibiades’. He was proud and unbiddable, touchily conscious of his dignity as a nobleman. Plutarch relates an anecdote about him as a child playing in the street, first refusing to interrupt a game of dice in order to allow a cart to go by, and then lying down in the vehicle’s path to show his defiance of the driver’s threats, risking his life rather than take orders from a common carter. He refused to learn to play the flute, on the grounds that flautists made themselves look ridiculous by pursing their lips: flute-playing at once went out of fashion among the smart Athenian youth. As an adolescent, according to his son, he disliked the favourite Athenian sport of wrestling because ‘some of the athletes (#litres_trial_promo) were of low birth’. As an adult, he was a keen breeder and trainer of horses, an amusement open only to the rich. He carried himself as one who knows himself to be a superior being, by virtue of his class but also because his gifts fitted him for a splendid destiny and because his gargantuan vitality would settle for no less. Plato records Socrates saying to him: ‘You appear to me (#litres_trial_promo) such that if any god were to say to you “Are you willing, Alcibiades, to live having what you now do, or would you choose to die instantly unless you were permitted greater things?” you would prefer to die.’ Socrates was not talking about material possessions. ‘Further, if the same god said “You can be master here in Europe, but will not be allowed to pass over into Asia”, it appears to me that you would not even on those terms be willing to live, unless you could fill the mouths of all men with your name and power.’ Like Achilles, Alcibiades, according to those intimate with him, had no use for an unremarkable life.

The device on his extravagantly splendid ivory and gold shield showed Eros with a thunderbolt, an image, combining aggressive sexuality with elemental violence, that nicely encapsulates the impression he made. He was prodigally, flashily generous. It was customary for wealthy Athenians with political ambitions to woo the populace by subsidizing choral performances and other public shows: Alcibiades’ were always the most lavish. His first public action was, characteristically, the donation of a quantity of money to the state, and it was performed with typically insouciant theatricality. He happened to be passing the place of assembly at a time when citizens had been asked to make voluntary contributions to the treasury to meet the costs of the war. He was carrying a live quail under his cloak, but hearing the applause with which donors were being received he went in, pledged a large sum, and at the same time inadvertently released the bird. There was laughter and a scramble that ended in a seaman named Antiochus catching the quail and handing it back to Alcibiades. The meeting was to prove a fateful one. Antiochus’ next appearance in recorded history is in the role of catalyst for Alcibiades’ downfall. For the time being, though, he was assisting at an auspicious occasion, the public debut of the rich young dilettante whose mind was on sport but who had demonstrated that he could, if it happened to please him, be of substantial service to the state.

While still in his teens Alcibiades served his stint in the army, as all Athenians were required to do, sharing a tent with Socrates. Philosopher and disciple each acquitted themselves well, but when Socrates saved the younger man’s life, fighting off the enemy when he lay wounded, it was Alcibiades who was awarded a crown and suit of armour as a prize for valour – an injustice that owes something to Socrates’ selflessness, something to the generals’ snobbery, and something as well to Alcibiades’ frequently noted gift for gaining the credit for more than he had actually performed. His actions were as ostentatious as his appearance. ‘Love of distinction (#litres_trial_promo) and desire for fame’ were, according to Plutarch, the engines that drove him. But courageous he certainly was, and popular with both the common soldiers and those who commanded him.

Warfare provided an outlet for his prodigious energies. In civilian life, they festered. Cornelius Nepos praises his accomplishments and abilities but goes on: ‘but yet, so soon (#litres_trial_promo) as he relaxed his efforts and there was nothing that called for mental exertion, he gave himself again to extravagance, indifference, licentiousness, depravity’. He had voracious appetites, for sex, for drink, for luxury of all kinds, and he had the money to indulge them all. Already very rich himself, he married Hipparete, one of the wealthiest heiresses in Athens. The wedding seems to have scarcely interrupted his scandalous series of liaisons with courtesans. Scurrilous gossip later accused him of incest with his sister, mother, and illegitimate daughter. The charges are lurid and unconvincing (there is no other evidence that he even had a sister), but his reputation for promiscuity was undoubtedly well founded.

He was a high-handed swaggerer, someone by whom others were readily intimidated and who took pleasure in trying his power. He was jealous. Even Socrates said of him, albeit teasingly, ‘I am really quite scared (#litres_trial_promo) by his mad behaviour and the intensity of his affections.’ He was violent. As a boy he had beaten up a teacher who confessed to owning no copy of Homer’s works (an assault that was generally agreed – such was the mystique accorded the two epics – to redound to the perpetrator’s credit). He once struck his father-in-law simply for a wager. He thrashed a man who had dared to subsidize a chorus in competition with the one he himself had sponsored. He was rumoured to have killed a servant. When he wanted his house decorated with murals he abducted the distinguished painter Agatharchus, locked him up in the house until he had done the work, then sent him home with a cartload of gold. Annoyed by Anytus, one of the many older men who doted on him, he refused an invitation to dinner but then arrived at the party, late and visibly drunk, with a gang of slaves whom he ordered to seize half of the gold and silver vessels Anytus had laid out to impress his guests (only Athenaeus, of the several ancient writers to tell this story, softens it by mentioning that Alcibiades subsequently gave the valuable dishes to a needy hanger-on). When Hipparete, rendered desperate by her husband’s shameless infidelities, appeared before the magistrates to petition for a divorce, Alcibiades interrupted the proceedings, seized her, and carried her home through the marketplace, ‘and not a soul (#litres_trial_promo) dared oppose him or take her from him’. Such delinquency in one so high placed and privileged was unnerving. It threatened to disrupt not only the lives of his immediate circle, but of the whole community that observed him, fascinated and fearful. Timon, the notorious misanthrope, once accosted Alcibiades in the street, shook him by the hand, and said: ‘You are doing well (#litres_trial_promo), my boy! Go on like this and you will soon be big enough to ruin the lot of them.’

As befitted Pericles’ ward, he soon began to make his mark in the Assembly, displaying, according to the great Demosthenes himself, an ‘extraordinary power’ of oratory. Pericles had died in 429 BC. By 421 Alcibiades, though not yet thirty, was one of the two most influential men in the city. The other, Nicias, was in nearly every way his opposite. Older than his rival by twenty years, Nicias was cautious, timid, and notoriously superstitious. Alcibiades’ indiscretions were brazen; Nicias used to shut himself up in his house at night rather than waste time or risk being duped by a spy. Alcibiades liked to dazzle the public; Nicias was careful to ascribe his success to the favour of the gods in order to avoid provoking envy. Most importantly, Alcibiades saw the by now protracted war against the Spartans as a splendid opportunity for the aggrandisement of himself and of his city; Nicias longed only to end it.

In 421 BC he succeeded temporarily in doing so. He negotiated a treaty whereby the Peloponnesians and the Athenians agreed to exchange prisoners and to restore all of each other’s captured territory. But, as Plutarch records, ‘No sooner (#litres_trial_promo) had [Nicias] set his country’s affairs on the path of safety than the force of Alcibiades’ ambition bore down upon him like a torrent, and all was swept back into the tumult of war.’ There were disputes about the procedure for restoring the conquered cities and fortresses, disputes that Alcibiades aggravated and exploited. A Spartan delegation arrived in Athens. Alcibiades tricked them and undermined their standing, ensuring that the Assembly would refuse to deal with them and sending them home humiliated and enraged. Nicias followed after them but was unable to repair the damage: the Spartans rejected his overtures, the Athenians had lost their enthusiasm for the peace. Alcibiades was elected general (for one year, as was the custom). He forged an alliance with Mantinea, Elis, and Argos, and took Athens back to war.

There were those who accused him of making war for personal gain. Certainly there were prizes to be won which he would have welcomed. He had a reputation for financial rapacity. His father-in-law (or brother-in-law, accounts differ) was so afraid of him that he entrusted his enormous fortune to the state, lest Alcibiades might be tempted to kill him for it. He had already, after demanding a dowry of unprecedented size, extorted a second equally enormous sum from his wife’s family on the birth of their first child. His wealth was immense, but so was his expenditure. ‘His enthusiasm (#litres_trial_promo) for horse breeding and other extravagances went beyond what his fortune could supply,’ wrote Thucydides. Besides, in the Athenian democracy (as in several of the modern democracies for which Athens is a model), only the very rich could aspire to the highest power. Alcibiades needed money to pay for choruses, for largesse, for personal display designed, not solely to gratify his personal vanity, but to advertise his status as a great man.

But the war offered him far more than money. It provided him with a task hard and exhilarating enough to channel even his fantastic vitality, and it afforded an opportunity for him to satisfy the driving ambition Socrates had seen in him. Nicias, his rival, understood him well, and paid back-handed tribute to his eagerness for glory when he told the Athenian Assembly to ‘Beware of [Alcibiades] (#litres_trial_promo) and do not give him the chance of endangering the state in order to live a brilliant life of his own.’

As advocate for the war, Alcibiades was spokesman for the young and restless, and also for the lower classes. He probably belonged to one of the clubs of wealthy young Athenians, clubs that were generally (and correctly) suspected to be breeding-places of oligarchic conspiracy, but there is no evidence he had any such sympathies. Haughty and spectacularly over-privileged as he was, his political affiliations were democratic. In his personal life he defied class divisions. Homer’s lordly Achilles detests the insolent commoner Thersites, and in an extra-Homeric version of the tale of Troy he kills him, thus upholding the dignity of the warrior caste and silencing the mockery of the people. Alcibiades would not have done so. He earned the disapproval of his peers by consorting with actors and courtesans and other riffraff, and he was to remain friends for most of his life with Antiochus, the common seaman who caught his quail. Politically, he followed the example of his guardian Pericles in establishing his power base among the poorer people, who tended to favour war (which was expensive for the upper classes, who were obliged to pay for men and ships, but which offered employment, decent pay, and a chance of booty to the masses). According to Diodorus Siculus, it was the youthful Alcibiades who urged Pericles (#litres_trial_promo) to embroil Athens in the Peloponnesian War as a way of enhancing his own standing and diverting popular attention from his misdemeanours. Certainly Alcibiades would have learnt from observing his guardian’s career that, as Diodorus puts it, ‘in time of war (#litres_trial_promo) the populace has respect for noble men because of their urgent need of them … whereas in time of peace they keep bringing false accusations against the very same men, because they have nothing to do and are envious’.

The Athenian alliance was defeated in 418 BC at the battle of Mantinea, but its failure cannot be blamed on Alcibiades, whose term as general had elapsed. During the following years he loomed ever larger in the small world of Athens, menacing those who mistrusted him, dazzling his many admirers. Everything about him was excessive – his wildness, his glamour, his ambition, his self-regard, the love he inspired. In a society whose watchword was ‘Moderation in all things’ he was a fascinatingly transgressive figure, an embodiment of riskiness, of exuberance, of latent power. ‘The fact was (#litres_trial_promo)’, writes Plutarch, ‘that his voluntary donations, the public shows he supported, his unrivalled munificence to the state, the fame of his ancestry, the power of his oratory and his physical strength and beauty, together with his experience and prowess in war, all combined to make the Athenians forgive him everything else.’

The dinner party described in Plato’s Symposium, which contains the fullest contemporary description of Alcibiades, dates from this period. The host is the poet Agathon, who is celebrating having won the tragedian’s prize. As the wine goes round the guests take turns to talk about love. They are serious, competitive, rapt. At last it is Socrates’ turn. In what has proved one of the most influential speeches ever written he enunciates his deadly vision of a love divested in turn of physicality, of human affection, of any reference whatsoever to our material existence. He finishes. There is some applause and then – right on cue – comes a loud knocking at the door. There is an uproar in the courtyard, the sounds of a flute and of a well-known voice shouting, and suddenly there in the doorway is the living refutation of Socrates’ austere transcendentalism. The philosopher has been preaching against the excitements of the flesh and the elation attendant on temporal power. To mock him comes Alcibiades, wild with drink, his wreath of ivy and violets slanted over his eyes, flirtatious, arrogant, alarming, a figure of physical splendour and worldly pride forcing himself into that solemn company like a second Dionysus. No wonder, as Nepos wrote, Alcibiades filled his fellow Athenians ‘with the highest hopes (#litres_trial_promo), but also with profound apprehension’.

In 416 BC, when he was thirty-four, he entered no fewer than seven chariots in the games at Olympia, something no one, commoner or king, had ever done before him, and carried off three prizes. Euripides wrote a celebratory ode: ‘Victory shines (#litres_trial_promo) like a star, but yours eclipses all victories’. The games were far more than a sporting event: they were festivals of great religious and political significance attended by crowds from all over the Greek world. Alcibiades celebrated his triumph with superb ostentation, drawing on the resources of his far-flung clients and dependants, pointedly making a display of a network of personal influence spreading all the way across the eastern Mediterranean. ‘The people of (#litres_trial_promo) Ephesus erected a magnificently decorated tent for him. Chios supplied fodder for his horses and large numbers of animals for sacrifice, while Lesbos presented him with wine and other provisions which allowed him to entertain lavishly.’ Alcibiades was only a private citizen, but with his wealth and his pan-Hellenic connections he formed, on his own, a political entity that looked like rivalling Athens itself.

It was too much. On the plain before Troy, Achilles measured his status as an outstandingly gifted individual against Agamemnon’s regal authority. At Olympia, Alcibiades, in parading his wealth, his influence and his talent, seemed to be issuing a parallel challenge to the state of which he was part but which he threatened to eclipse. So, at least, his contemporaries understood the spectacle. He was accused of having the city’s gold and silver ceremonial vessels carried in his triumphal procession and of having used them at his own table ‘as if they were (#litres_trial_promo) his own’. Non-Athenians, maintained one of his critics, ‘laughed at us when they saw one man showing himself superior to the entire community’. Answering the grumblers, Alcibiades asserted that in making himself splendid he was doing a service to his country, that a city needs its illustrious men to personify its power. ‘There was a time (#litres_trial_promo) when the Hellenes imagined that our city had been ruined by the war, but they came to consider it even greater than it really is because of the splendid show I made as its representative at the Olympic games … Indeed this is a very useful kind of folly, when a man spends his own money not only to benefit himself but his city as well.’ Not everyone was convinced. After Alcibiades won another victory at the Nemean games, the great painter Aristophon exhibited a portrait of him. Any visual representation of him, it should be remembered, would have paid tribute to his striking beauty, and beauty, in fifth-century Athens, was commonly understood to make a man eligible for far more than mere sexual conquest. ‘This much is clear (#litres_trial_promo),’ wrote Aristotle in the next generation. ‘Suppose that there were men whose bodily physique showed the same superiority as is shown by the statues of the gods, then all would agree that the rest of mankind would deserve to be their slaves.’ The people crowded to see Aristophon’s painting, but there were those who ‘thought it a sight (#litres_trial_promo) fit only for a tyrant’s court and an insult to the laws of Athens’. There was no place within a democracy for an Alcibiades. ‘Men of sense (#litres_trial_promo)’, warned a contemporary orator in an address entitled ‘Against Alcibiades’, ‘should beware of those of their fellows who grow too great, remembering it is such as they that set up tyrannies.’

In the winter of 416–415 BC Alcibiades was at last presented with an adventure commensurate with his ambition. A delegation arrived in Athens from Sicily, asking the Athenians to intervene in a war between their own colonists there and the people of Syracuse, a colony and powerful ally of the Spartans. The careful Nicias put forward sound arguments against undertaking such a risky and unnecessary venture, but Alcibiades was all for action. According to Plutarch, he ‘dazzled the imagination (#litres_trial_promo) of the people and corrupted their judgement with the glittering prospects he held out’. All Athens caught his war fever. The young men in the wrestling schools and the old men in the meeting places sat sketching maps of Sicily in the sand, intoxicating themselves with visions of conquest and of glory. The projected invasion of Sicily was not expedient, it was not prudent, it was not required by any treaty or acknowledged code of obligation; but its prospect offered excitement, booty, and the intangible rewards of honour. In the Assembly, Alcibiades, the man of whom it was said that without some great enterprise to engage his energies he became decadent, self-destructive, and a danger to others, ascribed to the state a character to match his own: ‘My view is (#litres_trial_promo) that a city which is active by nature will soon ruin itself if it changes its nature and becomes idle.’ He argued that, like himself, Athens was the object of envy and resentment, impelled for its own safety to make itself ever greater and greater. ‘It is not possible for us to calculate, like housekeepers, exactly how much empire we want to have.’ At Olympia, he claimed, Alcibiades was identified with Athens. Now, in urging the war in Sicily, he was offering Athens the chance to identify with Alcibiades, to be, like him, bold and reckless and superbly overweening.

He won fervent support. Nicias, in a last attempt to halt the folly, pointed out that the subduing of all the hostile cities in Sicily would require a vast armada, far larger and more expensive than the modest expeditionary force initially proposed. But the Assembly had by this time cast parsimony as well as prudence to the winds. They voted to raise and equip an army and navy commensurate with their tremendous purpose. The generals appointed to command the expedition were one Lamachus, the appalled and reluctant Nicias, and Alcibiades.

The resulting host’s might was matched by its splendour. The captains (gentlemanly amateurs whose civic duty it was to outfit their own ships) had ‘gone to great expense on figure-heads and general fittings, every one of them being as anxious as possible that his own ship should stand out from the rest for its fine looks and for its speed’. Those who would fight on land had taken an equally competitive pride in their handsome armour. When the fleet lay ready off Piraeus it was, according to Thucydides, ‘by a long way (#litres_trial_promo) the most costly and finest-looking force of Hellenic troops that up to that time had ever come from a single city’.

On the appointed day, shortly after midsummer, almost the entire population of Athens went down to the waterfront to watch the fleet sail. A trumpet sounded for silence. A herald led all of the vast crowds on ship and shore in prayer. The men poured libations of wine from gold and silver bowls into the sea. A solemn hymn was sung. Slowly the ships filed out of the harbour, then, assembling in open sea, they raced each other southwards. All the onlookers marvelled at the expedition’s setting out, at ‘its astonishing daring (#litres_trial_promo) and the brilliant show it made’, and were awed by the ‘demonstration of the power and greatness of Athens’, and incidentally the power and greatness of Alcibiades, the expedition’s instigator and co-commander. This appeared to be a triumph to make his victory at Olympia seem trivial. But by the time he sailed out at the head of that great fleet, Alcibiades’ downfall was already accomplished. The brilliant commander was also a suspected criminal on parole. The Athenians, who had entrusted the leadership of this grand and perilous enterprise to Alcibiades, had given him notice that on his return he must stand trial for his life. In his story, the pride and the fall are simultaneous.

One morning, shortly before the armada was due to sail, the Athenians awoke to find that overnight all the Hermae, the familiar idols that stood everywhere, on street corners, in the porches of private houses, in temples, had been mutilated. A wave of shock and terror ran through the city. The Hermae represented the god Hermes. Often little more than crude blocks of stone topped with a face and displaying an erect penis in front, they were objects both of affection and of reverence. Thucydides called them ‘a national institution’. Now their faces had been smashed and, according to Aristophanes, their penises hacked off. The outrage threatened the Athenians at every level. The gods must be angry, or if not angry before they would certainly have been enraged by the sacrilege. It was the worst possible omen for the projected expedition. Besides, the presence in the city of a hostile group numerous enough to perpetrate such a laborious outrage in a single night was terrifying. There were panic-stricken rumours. Some believed that the city had been infiltrated by outside enemies – possibly Corinthians. Others asserted that the culprits were treacherous Athenians, that the desecration was the first manifestation of a conspiracy to overthrow the democracy. An investigation was launched. Rewards were offered to anyone coming forward with useful information and informers’ immunity was guaranteed. One Andocides accused himself and other members of his club, which may well have been an association of would-be oligarchs; but Thucydides (along with most other ancient sources) seems to have considered his confession a false one. ‘Neither then (#litres_trial_promo) nor later could anyone say with certainty who had committed the deed.’

In the atmosphere of panic and universal suspicion, other dark doings came to light. It was a fine time for the undoing of reputations. Alcibiades had many opponents. Nicias’ supporters resented his popularity. So did the radical demagogues, especially one Androcles, who was instrumental in finding, and perhaps bribing, slaves and foreigners ready to testify to the investigators. Three separate informers, apparently seeing one form of sacrilege as being much the same as another, told stories of the Eleusinian Mysteries being enacted, or rather parodied, at the houses of various aristocratic young men. On all three occasions Alcibiades was said to have been present, and at one he was alleged to have played the part of the High Priest. The punishment for such impious action could only be death.

The allegation was, and remains, credible. Fourteen years later Socrates was to die on a charge of failing to honour the city’s gods, a charge against which he scarcely deigned to defend himself, and Socrates had been Alcibiades’ mentor. It is unlikely the young general was devout in any conventional sense. Besides, Alcibiades’ ‘insolence’ and his readiness to breach taboos were well known. Gossip had it that he had even staged a mock murder (#litres_trial_promo), shown the corpse to his friends, and asked them to help conceal the crime. If he was ready to make a game of the solemnity of death, why should he be expected to stop short of blaspheming against the gods?

Whatever the truth, Alcibiades vociferously asserted his innocence, and declared his readiness to stand trial and clear his name. His opponents demurred. He was the charismatic leader of the expedition from which all Athenians were hoping for so much. His popularity was at its height. Thucydides writes that his enemies feared that the people would be over-lenient with him were he to come to trial. They probably feared more than that. ‘All the soldiers (#litres_trial_promo) and sailors who were about to embark for Sicily were on his side, and the force of 1,000 Argive and Mantinean infantry had openly declared that it was only on Alcibiades’ account they were going to cross the sea and fight in a distant land.’ The expeditionary force was, in effect, his army. To impeach him while it lay in the harbour would trigger a mutiny. To put him to death might well start a civil war. His accusers temporized. They did not wish to delay the fleet’s departure, they said. Alcibiades should sail, but the charges against him remained outstanding. On his return, whatever happened in Sicily, he must face his accusers.

Perhaps a quick victory might have made it possible for him to win his case and salvage his position, but that victory was not forthcoming. The money promised by the Athenian colonies in Sicily, essential for the maintenance of the expeditionary force, had never existed. Cities they had thought their allies refused to let them land. Alcibiades managed to take Catania, but it was a small gain and came too late. At home in Athens more informers had been coming forward. With so many of the fighting men who admired him absent on campaign Alcibiades had fewer supporters left in the city. Without his presence to dazzle or intimidate them, the Assembly turned against him. In August, only weeks after he had sailed out of Piraeus with such pomp, the Salaminia, the state ship, arrived at Catania bringing orders recalling him at once to Athens to answer the charges against him.

This, Alcibiades’ first fall, was brought about in part by himself – whether or not he was guilty as charged, he had undoubtedly been reckless in his defiance of conventional propriety and arrogant in his disdain for the public’s opinion of his wild ways – and in part by the intrigues of his political rivals. But beyond those immediate causes of his downfall lies something more nebulous and more fundamental. Alcibiades was a hero. He had the charisma and the prodigious talents of his legendary predecessors. And the Athenians feared their heroes as fervently as they worshipped them, and they feared even more the tendency to hero-worship in themselves.

Months before his fall, Alcibiades had told the Assembly he knew full well that ‘people whose brilliance (#litres_trial_promo) has made them prominent’ aroused suspicion and dislike. The Athenians were notoriously wary of their great men. Aristotle expressed a popular sentiment when he described a polity that contained an outstanding individual as being as ill proportioned (#litres_trial_promo) as a portrait in which one foot was gigantic. Alcibiades had already been subjected to one of the methods by which the Athenians rid themselves of those grown too great. In 417 BC an ostracism had been proposed. ‘They employ this measure (#litres_trial_promo) from time to time,’ wrote Plutarch, ‘in order to cripple and drive out any man whose power and reputation in the city may have risen to exceptional heights.’ Each citizen wrote a name on a piece of potsherd. The unfortunate winner of most votes was banished for ten years. The target in this case was either Alcibiades or Nicias, but the two joined forces and by vigorous campaigning contrived that the majority of votes went to a comparative nonentity (who was probably the instigator of the ostracism). It was, for Alcibiades, a warning of how little his compatriots liked brilliance. There were plenty of other instances to underline the point. In Alcibiades’ lifetime Phidias, the sculptor and designer of the Parthenon, died in jail, possibly poisoned, after being accused by a jealous rival of embezzlement. Pericles himself was stripped of his command and fined the enormous sum of fifteen talents when the Assembly agreed to blame him for the plague (a decision which, in ascribing to him a power to rival that of Providence, was in itself a kind of tribute to his superhuman capacity). The astronomer Anaxagoras was imprisoned; Euripedes was so slighted that he left Athens for Macedonia; and five years after Alcibiades died, his mentor and the love of his youth, Socrates, was put to death. ‘The people were ready (#litres_trial_promo) to make use of men who excelled in eloquence or intellectual power,’ wrote Plutarch, ‘but they still looked on them with suspicion and constantly strove to humble their pride.’

Alcibiades was not only exceptional: he was also bellicose. The Athenians were a fighting people, but they were also justly proud of their great creation, a civilization based on the resolution of differences by non-violent dispute. The heroes of old were still worshipped in classical Athens. Hero cults were numerous, and attracted distinguished devotees (Alcibiades’ contemporary Sophocles was a priest in the cult of the hero Halon). But the heroes were fierce spirits who had to be propitiated. They were thirsty for blood, which was poured, after dark, into trenches at the supposed site of their burials; and if they were not appeased, their anger was terrible.

‘Let me seize (#litres_trial_promo) great glory,’ Homer’s Achilles begs his mother, ‘and drive some woman of Troy … /To claw with both hands at her tender cheeks and wipe away/Her burning tears as the sobs come choking from her throat.’ Homer’s warriors know full well that their splendid exploits are the cause of others’ grief: they may regret the fact, but they do not jib at it. To later generations, though, their ruthlessness came to seem savage and abhorrent. In the Iliad Achilles sacrifices twelve Trojan prisoners on Patroclus’ pyre, slaughtering them in cold blood and hacking their bodies to pieces. Homer reports his action briefly and without condemnation; but to Euripides, who had celebrated Alcibiades’ Olympic victory with a song, Achilles’ human sacrifices were monstrous. In his Hekabe Achilles’ ghost demands the slaughter of the Trojan Princess Polyxena on his grave. In Iphigenia at Aulis Achilles is associated with Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his daughter. If she were not killed there would be no wind to carry the black ships to Troy, no war in which Achilles can demonstrate his valour. The death of the innocent girl is the necessary prerequisite for the fulfilment of the warrior’s glorious destiny: both the hero and his glory are tainted with her blood. In both plays, Achilles is the arrogant, pathologically violent representative of a code of conduct that is essentially destructive and inimical to the institutions of the family and of the civil state. There is a story, of which the earliest surviving version was written down by Flavius Philostratus in the second century ad but whose origin is probably much earlier, that Achilles’ ghost appeared to a merchant and demanded a slave girl who boasted of being descended from King Priam. The merchant, terrified, handed her over. The spectral hero fell upon her and tore her to pieces. In the light cast backwards across time by these horrific stories Homer’s account of Achilles’ rage over the loss of Briseis takes on a different shading. So do his feats on the Iliad’s field of battle. The brilliant warrior is also the slaughterer of fathers, husbands, farmers, councillors; the enemy of all women; the destroyer of civilized society.

The shattered Hermae were not the only ominous sight in the streets of Athens at the time the Sicilian expedition sailed out with Alcibiades as one of its commanders. It was the feast of Adonis, and groups of women dressed as though in deep mourning were carrying effigies of the dead youth, the beautiful young man whom Venus had loved, through the streets, wailing as they went. The sombre processions were not much remarked upon at the time; but later, when the terrible outcome of the expedition was known, they were remembered with a kind of horrified awe as presages of what was to come and, more particularly, as reminders of the price to others of one man’s glory. If the campaign was to fulfil what Socrates had identified as being Alcibiades’ ambition, ‘to fill the mouths (#litres_trial_promo) of all men with your name and power’, it would do so only at the cost of many other young men’s lives. It was a price the Athenians did not pay gladly. In one of the reversals frequent in the history of Athenian democracy the people first allowed themselves to be seduced by Alcibiades’ high talk of glorious conquest, and then, in a fit of self-disgust and revulsion, punished him for their own lapse into irrationality.

Alcibiades was not placed under arrest when the Salaminia arrived in Sicily. His opponents still feared provoking a mutiny and, as Plutarch remarked, Alcibiades ‘might very easily (#litres_trial_promo) have brought this about if he had wished’. But he preferred the role of exile to that of rebel. Apparently docile, he agreed to follow the Salaminia home in his own ship. In southern Italy he put ashore, and vanished. The Athenian Assembly tried him in his absence and condemned him to death. His estate was confiscated. His name was inscribed on a stele set up on the Acropolis as a monument to his disgrace. All the priests and priestesses of Athens were ordered to call down curses on him. A reward of a talent (a considerable fortune) was offered to anyone who could bring him in, dead or alive. Three months after he had sailed from Athens with such pomp and splendour he was an outcast, a hunted man with a price on his head.

What Alcibiades did next has identified him, in the opinion of many latter-day historians, as an unprincipled scoundrel. When he heard of the death sentence pronounced against him he is reported to have said grimly: ‘I will show them (#litres_trial_promo) I am still alive.’ Achilles turned traitor after his quarrel with Agamemnon, praying that his fellow Greeks should be beaten back to their ships. So, now, did Alcibiades. Before he even left Sicily, he had begun on his treachery. The Athenians had contacted an opposition group in the Sicilian city of Messina and arranged that they should open the gates to an Athenian attack. Alcibiades informed the pro-Spartan authorities in Messina of the plot. The attack was thwarted and the conspirators were put to death. From Italy Alcibiades crossed to the Peloponnese, and after first sending to ask for a guarantee of his safety, he made his way to Sparta. There he offered his services to his hosts, his native city’s archenemies. He urged them to intervene in Sicily (which they did, with devastating consequences for the Athenians). He also suggested that they do what the Athenians had for years been dreading that they might do – fortify the stronghold of Dekelea in the mountains north of Athens which commanded the route whereby the revenue from the silver mines, the tribute money from the offshore colonies, and, most importantly, food supplies, reached Athens. The Spartans acted on his advice. ‘It was this (#litres_trial_promo), more than any other single action,’ remarks Plutarch, ‘which wore down the resources of Athens, and finally ruined her.’

Such a betrayal, surely, could never be forgiven. Yet this was the same Alcibiades whom the Athenians were to welcome back seven years later with garlands and embraces and cries of joy, whom they crowned with a golden crown and elected general with supreme powers on both land and sea, the same Alcibiades of whom it was said that while he lived Athens could not die.

We live in a post-nationalist age, one in which Alcibiades’ disloyalty to his native city seems an absolute disqualification from the pantheon of heroism. But treason has not always been judged the action of the mean-spirited. Achilles despised the kind of status attainable by allegiance to a community of petty mortals and looked to Zeus for confirmation of his honour. Isolated in his tent, he stood by, implacably inactive, while the Trojans slew his compatriots. So, after the Athenians condemned him to death, Alcibiades, as far as his motives can be guessed at, acted for the rest of his life for himself alone, serving now Athens’ enemies, now Athens herself again, true only to himself and his limitless ambition. His Athenian contemporaries intermittently feared and distrusted him. Some hated him. But, traitor though he was, they did not despise him.

The relationship between the individual and the community in fifth-century Athens was an unstable one. The democratic assembly was terrifyingly fickle, inclined to turn savagely on its own servants. The generals who later replaced Alcibiades (after he was stripped of his command for the second time in 406 BC) were all put to death for alleged misconduct during a battle they had won for Athens. And just as the state could and did abandon its citizens, so citizens could quit the state. Both of the two great Athenian historians who wrote as contemporaries of Alcibiades, Thucydides and Xenophon, were to spend the majority of their adult lives away from the city, the former exiled for a military failure, the latter leaving of his own free will to serve first the Persian pretender Cyrus and subsequently the Spartans. Alcibiades’ defection would not have outraged his contemporaries to anything like the extent that it has shocked posterity.

Nor, given the influences to which he had been exposed, was it entirely unpredictable. The nurse who cared for him in his earliest childhood was a Spartan woman. His family had long had Spartan connections. One of his first political acts was to claim for himself the position of the Spartans’ representative in Athens, a job that had traditionally been performed by his forebears. When the Spartan delegates came to Athens to negotiate peace terms in 421 BC Alcibiades enjoyed privileged access to the most powerful of them, the ephor Endius, with whom he had family connections. The two states might be deadly enemies, but they were also near neighbours, and the links between upper-class families, in classical Greece as in medieval and early modern Europe, transcended national boundaries.

Besides, as an adolescent Alcibiades had been Socrates’ best-beloved disciple. Socrates was said to be the only person who could manage him, the only one whose opinion Alcibiades valued and whose advice he took. It is unclear how much influence the philosopher maintained over him once he was an adult, but unless Plato’s Symposium is entirely fictional (which is unlikely), they were still close friends in the year before the Sicilian expedition embarked. ‘What you have said (#litres_trial_promo)’, Alcibiades tells Socrates in Plato’s account, ‘stirs us to the depths and casts a spell over us.’ Much later, when the philosopher was on trial for his life, his friends were at pains to point out that he could not be held responsible for the actions of his followers, but that he influenced their thinking seems indisputable. In The Birds Aristophanes describes a group of unpatriotically pro-Spartan youths as having been ‘socratified’. The jibe was amply justified. The philosopher’s most prominent disciples included not only the traitor Alcibiades but also several others who were passionate admirers of all things Spartan. Xenophon the historian, who was one of Socrates’ devoted followers, fought for the Spartans against Persia, accepted an estate in recognition of his services from the Spartan King Agesilaus, and lived happily on it for twenty years. When Sparta was defeated by the Thebans in 371 BC, he was obliged to leave, but he did not return to Athens. Critias, the collaborator who was set up by the Spartans as leader of the oligarchic regime of the Thirty Tyrants in Athens in 404 BC, was another of Socrates’ circle. And so of course was Plato, a nobleman who had relatives among the Thirty and whose ideal state, as described in the Republic, has a constitution that resembles that of Sparta far more closely than the Athenian one. It has been argued (#litres_trial_promo) that when the restored Athenian democracy accused Socrates of ‘corrupting the youth’, and put him to death for it, the charge had a precise political meaning. He was being accused of being a Spartan sympathizer. The heroic stand he made at his trial, which has earned him the admiration of generations of libertarians and defenders of free speech and free enquiry, was made, if this theory is correct, in assertion of his right to commend one of the most repressive and secretive regimes in recorded history.

Sparta is the classical model for all subsequent totalitarian states, just as Athens is for democracies. It was a warrior society, dedicated with grim exclusivity to its own preservation and aggrandisement. The Spartans were a Dorian people who had invaded the Peloponnese from the north and had reduced the indigenous population, known as Helots, to a state of serfdom. The Helots had not submitted tamely. Their repeated uprisings were brutally suppressed. New ephors, on taking office, routinely declared war on them ‘in order that there might be no impiety in slaying them’. The state maintained a corps of Helot killers whose operations Plutarch describes: ‘They would be armed (#litres_trial_promo) with daggers and supplied with basic rations, but nothing else … At night they came down onto the roads and, if they found a Helot, would cut his throat.’ Sparta’s much admired stability was guaranteed only by the omnipresence within it of violence and sudden death.

The Helots were obliged to provide food for the master race. The Spartans, thus freed from the labour of providing for themselves, were able to devote themselves single-mindedly to the business of warfare. ‘The Spartans are, (#litres_trial_promo) of all men, those who admire poetry and poetic glory least,’ noted Pausanias. ‘They did not understand (#litres_trial_promo) how to be at leisure’, wrote Aristotle, ‘and never engaged in any kind of training higher than training for war.’

It was forbidden for any Spartan to travel abroad except for purposes of conquest and foreigners were not made welcome, for Lycurgus, the Spartans’ mythical lawgiver, had wished the society he created should remain permanently intact and unchanged and ‘along with strange people strange doctrines must come in’. Trade was virtually non-existent, each citizen living off the produce of his own allotted plot of land. Lycurgus had forbidden luxury of all sorts. The staple Spartan food was a black broth famous throughout Greece for its nastiness. Spartan houses were all identical, and so crudely built that, according to a patronizing Athenian joke, a Spartan visiting Corinth was astonished to see wooden planks and asked whether the trees in that region had square trunks. Spartan dress was austerely simple. Even Spartan speech was limited and deliberately brusque. The people maintained a ‘general habit of silence’, a ‘laconicism’ (the word means simply ‘Spartan’), which combined the caution of those whose rigidly conservative, authoritarian state permitted them no political voice and the dumbness of those whose every personal response was suppressed or put to public use.

The state was all-encompassing. Spartans, according to Plutarch, had ‘neither the time (#litres_trial_promo) nor the ability to live for themselves; but like bees they were to make themselves integral parts of the whole community’. The city was like a military encampment, where each person had allotted duties. All personal relationships were subordinated to that between the individual and the state. Male babies were inspected by the elders at birth. If they were not perfectly healthy they were thrown into a ravine. Those who passed muster were cared for by their parents until the age of seven, when they entered the school, a vast boot camp whose curriculum consisted almost entirely of gymnastics, where they learnt obedience to discipline, indifference to pain and the rigid suppression of private emotion.

The boys were systematically underfed and encouraged to steal to satisfy their perpetual hunger, but if they were caught in the act they were ruthlessly flogged. The young men lived in all-male dormitories but they were permitted to marry. A bride was abducted by force from her family home. Her hair was cropped back to her scalp by a ‘bridesmaid’, who then stripped her and left her lying alone on the floor of a darkened room to await her husband, who came late at night and stayed only long enough to perform his reproductive duty before returning to the men’s house. The couple’s subsequent encounters would be equally swift and furtive, and always nocturnal, so that a woman might give birth to several children before seeing her husband’s face. All men, of whatever age, took their meals in the communal mess (women ate separately, and were rationed to about one-sixth the quantity of food allowed to their menfolk). Men who refused to marry were punished and publicly shamed. Husbands who failed to impregnate their wives were pressured into inviting other men to do so. Jealousy was despised, along with all other manifestations of strong personal feeling. A mother who expressed contempt for a cowardly son was especially esteemed. Sparta was a place of throttled emotion, of willed dumbness and of furtive violence. ‘When the Spartans kill,’ wrote Herodotus, ‘they do so at night.’

This place of darkness and suppression, however, was widely admired even by its enemies. Socrates joked about the fashionable Athenian Spartophiles who wore short tunics and leather bands around their legs and mutilated their ears in the Spartan style. Spartans were praised for their frugality and their physical fitness, for the fortitude with which they bore pain, for their indifference to all forms of pleasure and their readiness to sacrifice themselves for the common good. To many Athenians they seemed, not enviable of course, but admirable: models of ascetic virtue, time travellers from a simpler but more dignified age. The austerity of their lifestyle made an aesthetic appeal even to those who would not themselves have wished to drink black broth. The authoritarianism of their rulers was insidiously seductive to those weary of the endless argument and counter-argument of the democratic process. Pindar wrote in praise of Sparta, its venerable council of elders, its young men’s conquering spears. And Plato, while overtly rejecting the Spartan system of government as being debased, incorporated many Spartan institutions and Spartan values into his ideal Republic, thus ensuring that Lycurgus’ programme for converting an individual into a useful component of the state has become intrinsic to Western ideals of manliness, of good citizenship, and of heroic virtue.

In Sparta Alcibiades was to describe Athenian democracy as ‘a system which is (#litres_trial_promo) generally recognized as absurd’; and although he was undoubtedly attempting to curry favour with his anti-Athenian audience, it is also possible that he spoke from the heart. He had proved a brilliant manipulator of the democratic Athenian Assembly, with powers of persuasion equal to those of the demagogues he despised; but once the Assembly had turned against him he would have had strong personal reasons to reject, not only that particular gathering, but the political system of which it was the foremost example. As an aristocrat he may have found the oligarchic Spartan system congenial. As a young and famously beautiful military commander he must have responded to the Spartan cult of the warrior: ‘In time of war (#litres_trial_promo) they relaxed the severity of the young men’s discipline and permitted them to beautify their hair and ornament their arms and clothing, rejoicing to see them, like horses, prance and neigh for the contest.’ He had felt in Athens what it was like to be at the mercy of people he considered his inferiors. He had been condemned by his own city for reasons that probably seemed to him pettifogging and stupid. Sparta may have seemed to him a home more fit for heroes.

Certainly it suited him to give his hosts that impression. He arrived in Sparta a penniless fugitive whose life depended on his winning the protection of his former enemies. Never again would he dazzle and intimidate in his youthful role of spoilt, swaggering dandy. In Athens, he had made a mock of public opinion. In Sparta, he was tactful, accommodating, charming. In Athens, he glittered like Achilles: in Sparta he showed that he could bend and change like Odysseus, Homer’s ‘man of twists and turns’. Achilles is absolutely self-consistent, totally transparent. He says he hates the man ‘who says one thing (#litres_trial_promo) but hides another in his heart’ as he hates the Gates of Death. Odysseus says the same thing in almost identical words, but he says it in the course of a speech we know to be a concatenation of lies. He is a diplomat and intriguer, a master of disguise and dissimulation. Alcibiades was like him. He was a chameleon, a brilliant role-player. He possessed, says Plutarch, ‘one special gift (#litres_trial_promo) which surpassed all the rest and served to attach men to him, namely that he could assimilate and adapt himself to the pursuits and the manner of living of others’.

He was an outcast now, and those deprived of their rooted identity are freed to reinvent themselves. The second-century theologian Justin Martyr described the lineage of Cain, those outsiders of Hebrew legend, as shape-shifters who could become at will birds, serpents, or quadrupeds. Alcibiades, an accursed exile like Cain, had the same protean gift, mark both of his untrustworthiness and his uncanny brilliance. In Athens his lifestyle had been luxurious to the point of decadence. Sailing to Sicily, he astonished his peers by having part of the deck of his trireme cut away so that he could sling up a hammock instead of sleeping, as all his compatriots, however exalted, did, wrapped in his cloak on the wooden deck. Now he became an ascetic. ‘By adopting Spartan customs in his everyday life he captivated the people and brought them under his spell.’ He grew his hair long in the Spartan fashion, took cold baths and ate coarse bread with the notorious black broth. (Ironically, this play-acting won him the accolade of being compared with the hero who was never anything but himself: ‘In Sparta, so far as all the externals went, one could say of him “This is no son of Achilles, but Achilles himself”.’) A marked man, he could no longer afford the self-indulgence of spontaneity. For the rest of his life, for all the glory and acclaim that still lay before him, he would have to please his audience, to mind his manners and watch his back.

He had to present himself to his new masters as something more than a renegade with an exhaustible fund of useful information. He could probably, had he been content to live a modest and private life, have bought himself sanctuary at the price of a few minor betrayals, but the restless, self-castigating ambition that Socrates had identified in him made such a solution to his problems inconceivable. When he arrived in Sparta in the winter of 415–414 BC he had yet to score any notable military successes. Deprived as he was of his social position, without his wealth, without an army, the only way he could win a role consonant with the ‘love of distinction and desire for fame’ that drove him all his life was to project an image of himself as a superman capable of accomplishing mighty deeds unaided. In Sparta he began the creation of that image.

He had a quick eye for the main chance. Odysseus is ‘never at a loss’ and Thomas Carlyle was to define a hero as ‘a man with an almost mythical awareness of what needed to be done’. Alcibiades was one such. The philosopher Theophrastus, who lived a century after him, thought that he ‘possessed in a higher degree (#litres_trial_promo) than any of his contemporaries the faculty of discerning and grasping what was required in a given situation’. Delegations arrived in Sparta from Sicily asking for help against the Athenians. Alcibiades seized his opportunity. He spoke in the Sicilians’ support, using the occasion to make his formal entry into Spartan public life. His speech, as reported by Thucydides, is a brilliant exercise in self-justification and self-aggrandisement. In it he publicly declares, for the first time, a tremendous programme of conquest and colonization of which the Sicilian expedition was to have been only the beginning. From Sicily, he told the Spartans, he would have led the Athenians on to Italy and, that territory once conquered, would have launched an attack on Carthage and its empire. Then, with all the might of their new western conquests to draw on, the Athenians would have returned to crush the Peloponnesians, to emerge finally as masters of the entire Mediterranean world.

Probably Alcibiades had entertained such intentions: they are entirely consonant with his well-attested ambition. But it is unlikely that such a grand design ever existed outside of his imagination, and inconceivable that Nicias would have consented to it. When Alcibiades told the Spartan Assembly that ‘The generals who (#litres_trial_promo) are left will, if they can, continue just the same to carry out these plans’ he was certainly lying. But the lie went undetected. The Spartans were persuaded. They decided to intervene in Sicily. And from then onwards, in their eyes and in posterity’s, the audacity and grandeur of those tremendous projected conquests attached themselves to Alcibiades, lending him the aura of a great man; one who, had he not been thwarted by his ungrateful compatriots, might have become, five years before Alexander of Macedon was born, a world-conquering Greek. The modern historian Donald Kagan pays tribute to his performance on this occasion: ‘One can only (#litres_trial_promo) marvel at his boldness, his imagination, his shrewd psychological understanding, and the size of his bluff.’

For the next two and a half years, Alcibiades lived in Sparta. Plutarch speaks pityingly of him wandering aimlessly about the city; but there is no evidence that he was humiliated by his hosts. The only story we have about his sojourn in Sparta is that of his liaison with Queen Timea, wife of Agis, one of Sparta’s two kings. Agis was abstaining from sex after an earthquake, which he took to be a divine warning, had interrupted his love-making with Timea. He was absent on campaign when a second earthquake shook the palace and a man was seen escaping from the Queen’s bedroom. That man, according to ancient gossip, was Alcibiades. Nine months later Timea gave birth to a son. The story may be scurrilous (Agis’ other heirs would have had a motive for alleging the baby was illegitimate), but it is perfectly credible. Alcibiades was as attractive as ever and unused to sexual continence. The child was later barred from succession. When challenged about his alleged paternity Alcibiades is reported as saying, with his characteristic arrogance, ‘that he had not done (#litres_trial_promo) this as a mere insult, nor simply to gratify his appetite, but to ensure that his descendants would one day rule over the Spartans’.

While Alcibiades dallied in Sparta the Athenians’ campaign in Sicily ended in horror. The fleet was annihilated. The entire army was either slaughtered or enslaved. The venture for which Alcibiades was largely responsible, and which he had envisioned as the first phase of a glorious series of conquests, left Athens crippled, without money, without ships, without fighting men. At once her colonies began to contemplate secession.

During the winter of 413–412 BC, two years after Alcibiades had arrived in Sparta, the Spartans were twice approached by rebellious oligarchic factions within Athenian colonies asking for support. In both cases the rebels already had Persian backing. The Great King’s satraps in the region were eager to exploit any weakness within the Athenian empire. Alcibiades was among those who advocated sending a fleet to support the rebels on the island of Chios. He must, after two years’ stagnation, have been craving action and the chance to cut a brilliant dash. King Agis, who had presumably heard the stories in circulation about Queen Timea’s surprising pregnancy, was by now openly hostile towards him. Unless he could do the Spartans some signal service Sparta would not be a safe refuge for much longer. He embarked on the second phase of his self-mythologizing. He personally, and he alone, he told the ephors, would be able to break Athens’ hold on the cities of the eastern Mediterranean. ‘He said he would easily (#litres_trial_promo) persuade the cities to revolt by informing them of the weakness of Athens and of the active policy of Sparta; and they would regard his evidence as being particularly reliable.’

The ephors were persuaded. A small fleet was assembled. The first group of ships to set out blundered into the Athenian fleet and were defeated. The commander was killed and the surviving ships blockaded off Epidaurus. The Spartans hesitated. Many were so discouraged by this first setback that they were ready to abandon the venture entirely, but Alcibiades succeeded in holding them to their purpose. A second group of five ships, commanded by the Spartan Chalcides but with Alcibiades on board as mastermind, dashed to Chios, arriving before the news of the first group’s defeat. Any seaman they encountered on the voyage was arrested and taken with them to ensure secrecy. They sailed up to the city while its Council was sitting. Alcibiades and Chalcides disembarked and marched into the assembly. To the consternation of the pro-Athenian party they announced that they were the vanguard of a Peloponnesian fleet (but omitted to mention that the rest of the aforesaid fleet was trapped several hundred miles away). The ruse was successful: their opponents capitulated. First Chios, then the neighbouring cities of Erythraea and Clazomenae, switched allegiance and prepared to resist the Athenians.

The suborning of Chios was a brilliant coup. It bears all Alcibiades’ trademarks: swiftness, audacity, a dependence on his own charisma and histrionic powers, flamboyant deception. Like the great runner Achilles he knew the value of speed, the way an army, or even a man, appearing where the rules of probability decree they cannot possibly be, can be as shocking and awesome as a supernatural apparition, demoralizing opposition and lending fresh courage to allies. Later that same year, after fighting all day in a desperate and unsuccessful attempt to repel the Athenians at Miletus, Alcibiades took horse and galloped southward through the night to meet the Peloponnesian fleet as it came into harbour and urge its captains to turn and sail on till morning. At dawn the next day, thanks to his despatch, the fleet appeared off Miletus and the Athenians slunk away ‘without realizing the fruit of their victory’. A masterly manipulator of the facts with which circumstances presented him, Alcibiades was one who could conjure up an illusion of victory, and use it to make that victory real.

His cunning and theatricality as a commander have their parallels in the political games he was obliged to play throughout the last ten years of his life to keep himself alive and in command. He was instrumental in the making of a treaty between the Persians and the Spartans that heavily favoured the former. There were suspicions in Sparta (quite possibly justified) that he was not a faithful servant to his adopted masters, masters who had a reputation for summarily and secretly killing those inconvenient to them. ‘The most powerful (#litres_trial_promo) and ambitious of the Spartans were by now both jealous and tired of him,’ says Plutarch. After the battle of Miletus the Spartan admiral received orders (probably originating with King Agis) to have Alcibiades put to death. Somehow, possibly warned by Queen Timea, who was so recklessly in love with him that in private she called her baby son by his name, Alcibiades heard of the order even before the admiral received it. A condemned man now in both halves of the Greek world, he slipped away from the Peloponnesian fleet and, turning his back not only on his native city but on his native culture, took refuge with the Persian Satrap Tissaphernes at Sardis.

The Satrap received him well. Plutarch describes Tissaphernes as one ‘who was naturally (#litres_trial_promo) inclined to malice and enjoyed the company of rogues, being anything but straightforward himself’, adding that he ‘admired intensely Alcibiades’ versatility and exceptional cleverness’. The Persian and the Athenian, two schemers and conjurors with the truth, became – apparently – fast friends. Once again Alcibiades played the chameleon, adopting (possibly with more enthusiasm than he had adopted Spartan asceticism) Persian luxury and Persian pomp. Once again his extraordinary charm worked its spell. ‘Even those who feared and envied him could not help taking pleasure in his company,’ writes Plutarch. Tissaphernes was so delighted with his guest that he named a pleasure garden ‘decorated in regal and extravagant style’ after him, one ‘famous for its refreshing streams and meadows and pavilions and pleasances’. Alcibiades ‘became his adviser (#litres_trial_promo) in all things’, says Thucydides. But his position was terrifyingly insecure, dependent as it was on a web of deceptions. Tissaphernes welcomed him initially on the understanding that he offered advice on behalf of the Spartans, the people who in fact now sought his death. Over the next year he was to play a perilous game of bluff and double-bluff with Persians and Greeks alike, borrowing others’ authority to cloak his real situation, which was that of an impotent and resourceless fugitive, and seeking to impress each party by laying claim to vast influence over another who at best distrusted him, at worst wanted him dead.

Achilles, rejected by his own people but still the inveterate enemy of their enemies, prayed that Achaeans and Trojans might cut each other to pieces, leaving no one alive but himself and his beloved Patroclus to stride together across the corpses into the shattered ruins of Troy. Alcibiades, doubly rejected and doubly a renegade, gave Tissaphernes advice that echoed Achilles’ ferocious wish: ‘Let the Hellenes (#litres_trial_promo) wear each other out among themselves.’ The Persian had been subsidizing the Peloponnesian fleet. Alcibiades suggested that he reduce the level of his support, lest the Spartans become a colonial power potentially as troublesome to Persia as Athens had been. The advice was shrewd. It was typical of Alcibiades, who preferred guile to bloodshed. It forcefully expresses his disengagement from all things Greek. It also, paradoxically, marks the beginning of his return to Greece. In Thucydides’ opinion, he ‘gave this advice (#litres_trial_promo) not only because he thought it was the best he could offer, but also because he was looking out for a way to be recalled to his own country’. He must have been acutely aware of the precariousness of his position in Sardis. Sparta was now closed to him. Tissaphernes’ favour offered him a chance of returning to Athens, where he had once been so popular and influential, where in times gone by the young men had imitated his sandals and their elders had looked to him to win for them an empire in the West. That chance depended on his ability to persuade the Athenians that he might be able to come back to them, not as the impotent exile he really was, but as one who could call on all the vast resources of Persia’s Great King and who might, on his own terms, use those resources to Athens’ advantage.

The Athenians, in his long absence, had had cause to question their wisdom in rejecting him. After his recall from Sicily, Nicias was left in the unenviable position of commanding a massive and aggressive campaign he himself had advised against from its inception. Irresolute, in pain from a diseased kidney, repeatedly terrified by ominous portents, he dithered and procrastinated through a war that ended in horror. The survivors straggled back to Athens, months or years after the final defeat, to recount their terrible experiences. They told of the repeated slaughters, of the infernal scene at the River Assinarus, where parched Athenians trampled over corpses to get a palmful of water fouled by their own compatriots’ blood, of the months after the surrender during which the survivors were held in the quarries outside Syracuse, with no room to move or lie down so that those many who died remained wedged upright among the living, of their subsequent enslavement. Initially, they were met with incredulity. The Athenians at home ‘thought that this (#litres_trial_promo) total destruction was something that could not possibly be true’. Next, the citizens turned murderously on those who had advocated the expedition and on the prophets and soothsayers who had promised success. Happy for Alcibiades, perhaps, that he was absent then. But over the next months and years, as Alcibiades was seen to serve their enemies so effectively at Chios and Miletus, suborning colonies just as he had intended to do, on Athens’ behalf, in Sicily, there must have been some of his fellow citizens who asked themselves what might have happened if only they had trusted him, if only he had been allowed to stand trial and clear his name, if only he had not been recalled. It is easier to admit to one’s own errors than to believe oneself helpless in the hands of a malign providence. There were many in Athens who blamed themselves, collectively if not personally, who believed that in turning against Alcibiades they had brought about their own downfall.

In the winter of 412–411 BC, when Alcibiades was with the Persians, the Athenian fleet was based at Samos, less than a mile off the coast of Asia Minor. Somehow, without Tissaphernes’ knowledge, Alcibiades communicated with the Athenian commanders there, first by letter and subsequently in secret meetings on the mainland. He intimated to them that if the democratic government in Athens were replaced by an oligarchy he would be able to persuade Tissaphernes to alter his policy. He would talk the Persian into supporting Athens, into paying their men and calling on the Phoenician navy, then supposedly lying inactive to the south, to fight alongside them. All this, Alcibiades suggested, he would do, if they could secure his pardon and restore him to his lost command. Most of the commanders, at least, believed him. One of them, Pisander, was to tell the people of Athens that for the sake of a Persian alliance they ‘must bring (#litres_trial_promo) Alcibiades back, because he is the only person now living who can arrange this for us’. Once more Alcibiades had succeeded in presenting himself as one uniquely gifted, able, as no one else was, to alter destiny.

The Athenian commanders on Samos sent a delegation, led by Pisander, to Athens to advocate his recall and the change of constitution Alcibiades had demanded. With some difficulty, they made their case. Devastated by the calamity in Sicily, Athens was no match for Sparta. Without Persian support, it was in danger of extinction, not only as a colonial power but even as an independent city-state. The citizens were persuaded that the sacrifice of their cherished democratic rights, at least temporarily, was necessary for their very survival. The Assembly authorized Pisander and ten companions to negotiate with Alcibiades and Tissaphernes. They travelled back east to Sardis, where the Satrap, with Alcibiades at his side, received them. Alcibiades spoke for his protector-cum-employer. To the Athenians’ angry astonishment he made demands to which they could not possibly accede. Bitterly disappointed, Pisander – an ambitious man with no love for the democracy – resolved to forget Alcibiades and seize power on his own account. He returned to Athens where he and his co-conspirators staged a coup d’état. They established a savagely repressive oligarchic regime known as the Four Hundred. For three months they held power, imprisoning and murdering any who opposed them. In Samos meanwhile, the Athenian navy, under Thrasybulus and Thrasyllus, both of whom were long-time associates of Alcibiades, swore to uphold the democracy, thus effectively splitting the Athenian polis into two opposed parts – an unprotected city and a homeless armada. Thrasybulus, who had been from the first an enthusiastic advocate of Alcibiades’ recall, with some difficulty persuaded the mass of soldiers and seamen to agree to it. At last, with their consent, he crossed to the mainland and brought Alcibiades back with him to Samos. Four years after his life had been declared forfeit and his name had been cursed by every priest in the city Alcibiades was back among Athenians, albeit not actually in Athens. The troops elected him a general ‘and put everything (#litres_trial_promo) into his hands’.

There is much that is baffling about these events, not least Alcibiades’ insistence on the overthrow of the Athenian democracy, which is inconsistent, not only with his subsequent acceptance of Thrasybulus’ invitation to become commander of the democratic forces, but also with his entire political history. But though the intricacies of his machinations during this tumultuous year will probably never be satisfactorily unravelled, his main strategy is clear. It was that of the confidence trickster so audacious that he gets away with his sting precisely because of its enormity. By the time Pisander’s delegation came to negotiate with him and Tissaphernes he had lost what influence he had had over the Satrap. The Spartan commander had contrived to let the Persian know that Alcibiades was communicating secretly with the Athenians. Tissaphernes may still have enjoyed Alcibiades’ company, but he no longer trusted him or acted on his advice. It is probable that Alcibiades deliberately aborted the negotiations with Pisander in order to avoid letting the Athenians perceive quite how impotent he really was. Thrasybulus saved him just in time from a potentially lethal situation. (Tissaphernes might well soon have found it expedient, as another Satrap was to do six years later, to trade Alcibiades’ life for the Spartans’ goodwill.) And yet, totally powerless as he was, dependent for his very survival on a foreign magnate who owed him nothing, he presented himself to the Athenians, oligarchs and democrats alike, as one who could dispose of the power of the greatest empire on earth. It is a measure of his astonishing nerve, of his indomitable charm, and of the potency of the glamour that had come to surround his name, that they appear to have believed him.

On Samos he spoke to the assembled Athenian forces, proclaiming that he, Alcibiades, had saved them, giving them, as Thucydides remarks drily, ‘a very exaggerated idea (#litres_trial_promo) of the strength of his influence with Tissaphernes’ and assuring them that, thanks to him, the Satrap would never let them go short of supplies, ‘not even if he [Tissaphernes] had to sell his own bed’. His speech was a pyrotechnical display of rabble-rousing optimism. He flattered and excited his hearers. He assured them of imminent victory. By the time he had finished speaking ‘there was not a man (#litres_trial_promo) who for anything in the world would have parted with his present hopes of coming through safely and of taking vengeance on the Four Hundred’. Intoxicated by the presence of their charismatic lost-and-found leader, the men were all for sailing on Athens directly. Alcibiades dissuaded them. Delegates arrived from Athens bearing placatory messages from the oligarchs. The troops would barely give them an audience and again, infuriated, cried out that they would sail on their own city and drive out the Four Hundred. Only Alcibiades’ presence averted what would have been a catastrophe for Athens. Once again he refused, as he had done at the time of his recall from Sicily, to play the mutineer. Such was his ascendancy over the troops that his oratory prevailed. ‘There was not another (#litres_trial_promo) man in existence’, wrote Thucydides, ‘who could have controlled the mob at that time.’

Just as he had used his supposed influence over Tissaphernes to win him authority over the Athenians, now he used his new authority over the Athenians to revive his influence over the Persian. His first action as an Athenian general was to revisit Sardis, making a display to Tissaphernes of his new status and to the Athenians of his supposedly close relationship with the Satrap. It was a game he continued to play until, in 410 BC, the emptiness of his hand was brutally exposed. The Satrap happened to be in the neighbourhood of the Athenian fleet. Alcibiades, still feeling the need to make a parade of his supposed friendship with Tissaphernes, visited him at the head of a princely retinue and bearing splendid gifts; but Tissaphernes had received new orders from the Great King: he was to give the Spartans his unequivocal support. Alcibiades’ pompous visit gave him a welcome opportunity to demonstrate his zeal. He had his visitor arrested and imprisoned in Sardis. Alcibiades got away after only a month, claiming that Tissaphernes was still sufficiently devoted to him to have connived at his escape, but he could no longer plausibly lay claim to any influence over Persian policy.

Fortunately for him, he no longer needed to. During the four years after his recall to Samos, he won, or helped to win, a series of brilliant victories for Athens in their struggle with the Peloponnesians for control of the Aegean and the Hellespont. By degrees, as one success followed another, his mystique became so potent that his followers felt themselves glorified by it. By 410 BC, according to Plutarch, ‘the soldiers who (#litres_trial_promo) had served under Alcibiades were so elated and confident that they disdained to mix any longer with the rest of the army: they boasted that the others had been defeated time and again, but that they were invincible’. Though he was only one of several Athenian commanders, and though Thrasybulus, for one, was his equal in military talent, Alcibiades was the most dazzling. It was he, not his peers, who addressed the troops before a battle; and it was he to whom glory accrued. As Cornelius Nepos remarked, ‘Thrasybulus accomplished (#litres_trial_promo) many victories without Alcibiades. The latter accomplished nothing without the former, and yet he [Alcibiades], by some gift of his nature, gained the credit for everything.’

For Athens, as for Sparta, his swiftness in action was astonishing. At the battle of Abydos in 411 BC his arrival with eighteen ships after racing north from Samos proved decisive. As he came into view, ‘the Spartans turned (#litres_trial_promo) and ran for shelter’, records Xenophon. A year later, before the battle of Cyzicus, he gained a crucial lead by galloping overland across the Gallipoli peninsula. During the battle itself he played the decoy, luring the Spartans out into open sea where his colleagues, Theramenes and Thrasybulus, could close in on their flank. When the Spartans saw the trap and attempted to retreat Alcibiades nimbly turned his ships and pursued them back to the shore. Cyzicus, a great victory for Athens, was a cooperative action, but it was Alcibiades, the fleet, the daring, who won most of the acclaim.

His Puck-like propensity for appearing where he was least expected was theatrical. So were his other gifts, for dazzling the eye and mind with his presence, for conspicuous courage, and for subterfuge. At Selymbria in 408 BC his arrangement with the friendly factions within the city, who were to show a lighted torch at midnight to signal that they were ready to open the gates and rise in support of him, was botched. The signal was given early, before Alcibiades’ army was prepared. Determined not to miss his opportunity, Alcibiades dashed into the city, followed by only fifty men, to find himself surrounded by the entire Selymbrian army. He was trapped. At any moment he could have been killed or captured. Coolly he ordered one of his men to a sound a trumpet and another to make a formal proclamation forbidding the Selymbrians to take up arms. The Selymbrians, bewildered by a performance so inappropriate to the reality of the situation, believed the performance and discounted the reality. Nervous and disoriented, afraid perhaps that the rest of the Athenians had already entered the city (impossible to be sure in the darkness), they failed to use their advantage. Stupefied by Alcibiades’ effrontery, they parleyed with him until his army at last came up and their surrender was assured.

In the same year he won the greater prize of Byzantium by similar sleight of hand. Again, he made contact with people within the city who were ready to betray their Spartan masters. The Athenians had been blockading the harbour; but on the appointed day, their fleet sailed away, or seemed to do so. At the same time, Alcibiades’ army, which had been besieging the city on the landward side, withdrew far enough to be out of sight. When night fell, the army silently returned, while the Athenian fleet sailed back into harbour and attacked the Spartan ships there ‘with a great deal (#litres_trial_promo) of shouting, commotion and uproar’. The Spartans and their supporters raced down to the waterfront. Meanwhile Alcibiades’ Byzantine allies placed ladders against the walls allowing his men to flood into the city and to overwhelm its defenders. The decisive moment of the battle came when Alcibiades, who understood the strategic value of magnanimity, had it proclaimed throughout the city that the Byzantines would not be harmed, and a decisive proportion of the population abruptly changed sides.

The Athenian troops adored him: he had yet to test the temper of the Athenians at home. Pisander’s oligarchy was short lived. The politically moderate government of the Five Thousand that replaced it endorsed Alcibiades’ command and invited him to return. But he waited another four years before he risked re-entering the city from which he had been outcast, in which his name had been anathematized and he himself condemned to die. When he finally returned he did so as the victor in a war that had made the Hellespont, at least temporarily, an Athenian lake. As Plutarch explains, ‘he had thought (#litres_trial_promo) it best not to meet [the Athenians] empty handed, without any positive achievement to his credit and owing his recall to the pity and good nature of the people, but rather to arrive in a blaze of glory’.

Two hundred years later Duris of Samos, who claimed to be Alcibiades’ descendant, wrote an excited description of his return to Athens, at the head of a great fleet of ships decorated from stem to stern with captured shields and trophies, with flute players and actors timing the oarsmen’s strokes, and with Alcibiades’ own ship rigged with purple sails ‘as though he were (#litres_trial_promo) leading a crowd of revellers after some drinking party’. More reliable sources give a less festive but more dramatic account. Thrasyllus went ahead with the main body of the fleet while Alcibiades, with only twenty ships, delayed. Perhaps he calculated that it would be to his advantage to let the bulk of the fighting men, who adored him, arrive in the city before he did, and to give them time to spread tales of his prowess among the citizens. He stopped to raise money (conscious as ever of its usefulness in procuring popularity) and sailed for Athens only after he had received word that the Assembly had expressed its approval by electing him general once again. Even then he was apprehensive. It is unclear from the ancient sources whether the death sentence against him had ever been formally revoked: he still had many enemies in the city. Arriving at Piraeus, he anchored close to the shore and scanned the waiting crowd. Only when he had picked out a group of friends, including one of his cousins, did he feel safe enough to land. He came ashore surrounded by a bodyguard ready to fight off any attempt at arresting him.

His caution must quickly have given way to triumph. His return was greeted with wild scenes of celebration. This homecoming was his apotheosis, the moment when the Athenians received him as though he were one of Plato’s men of gold, a quasi-divine hero who could lead them forward to a glittering future. A vast crowd, near-hysterical with joy, had gathered on the waterfront. According to Diodorus Siculus, ‘all men thronged (#litres_trial_promo) to the harbour to catch sight of Alcibiades, the slaves vying with the free so that the city was entirely deserted’. The entire crowd, alight with enthusiasm, escorted him back into the city, yelling out their exultation as they went. People struggled to get close enough to embrace him and to crown him with garlands. Many wept ‘for they reflected (#litres_trial_promo) that they would never have suffered the Sicilian disaster or any of their terrible disappointments if only they had left Alcibiades in command’; but their regrets were mingled with rejoicing, for according to Diodorus, ‘practically all men (#litres_trial_promo) believed’ that with his return from exile ‘great fortune had come again to the city’.

Carried on the wave of the jubilant throng, Alcibiades made his way to the Pnyx, where he spoke to the full Assembly. He was a magnificent figure, his beauty, according to Plutarch, being as great in the prime of his manhood as it had been when he was a boy, ‘lending him extraordinary grace and charm’. He was also a brilliant player on others’ emotions. Shrewdly, he chose to be magnanimous, to blame no one for his exile. Instead, with tears in his eyes, he spoke of ‘ill-fortune’ and the ‘evil genius that had dogged his career’. Many listeners wept. Others cried out angrily, just as if, remarks Cornelius Nepos drily, ‘it had been another (#litres_trial_promo) people, and not those who were then shedding tears, that had condemned him for impiety’. He ended his speech with rousing optimism, promising Athens a splendid future. His audience applauded ecstatically. His confiscated property was restored to him. The stele recording his disgrace was taken down from the Acropolis and thrown into the sea. The priests were commanded to solemnly revoke the curses they had once cast on him. He was crowned with a golden crown and appointed general with absolute authority by land and sea (a title which only his guardian Pericles had held before him). For years – in Sparta, in Sardis, in Samos – he had been claiming superhuman powers for himself. Now, at last, unreal as it still was, that claim was believed by his compatriots. Alcibiades was acclaimed throughout the city as the man who could make Athens great once more.

The extravagant joy that attended his homecoming was followed by an even more impressive demonstration of his rehabilitation. The grandest spectacle of the Athenian religious calendar was the procession that escorted the sacred objects and the image of the god Iacchus from Athens to Eleusis, some fourteen miles away, for the annual celebration of the Mysteries. The marchers included young men about to be initiated, initiates wreathed with myrtle and long-robed priests. Bands of flute players, dancers, and hymn-singing choirs accompanied the procession, which halted frequently along the route to make sacrifices and to perform sacred rites. Holiday and awe-inspiring spectacle at once, the ceremony held profound significance for all Athenians, but for several years it had not taken place. The presence of the Spartan garrison at Dekelea in the mountains overlooking the route had rendered it too dangerous. Instead, Iacchus had been carried by boat to Eleusis with a small escort and none of the usual attendant ceremony, a compromise sadly emblematic of Athens’ reduced and endangered condition.

Alcibiades – the traitor who had advised the Spartans to fortify Dekelea, the blasphemer who had repeatedly made a mock of the Eleusinian Mysteries and who had been condemned to death for doing so – seized the chance to demonstrate his reformation with an operation exactly designed to erase his past sins. Scrupulously devout now, he first consulted the priests before announcing, with their approval, that the procession would take place. He posted look-outs on the hilltops all along the route, sent out an advance guard at daybreak to clear the way and then, surrounding the procession with his troops, escorted it to Eleusis and back. Had King Agis led out an attacking force from Dekelea Alcibiades would have been able to make a parade of his military skills and his loyalty, fighting, in sight of all Athens, to defend the sacred mysteries. As it was, the procession went and returned unmolested. The participants had walked, according to Plutarch, ‘in solemn order (#litres_trial_promo) and complete silence’. Throughout the thirty-mile journey they must have been in a state of mingled terror and exaltation. When they returned safely to the city their relief, and that of the watching citizens, was expressed in further outbursts of rapturous acclaim for Alcibiades. The poorer classes especially were convulsed by an ‘extraordinary passion’ for him. The troops were exultant, boasting once again that under his command they were invincible. The one-time blasphemer was hailed as ‘a high priest and an initiator into the Mysteries’. It seemed there was nothing he could not do.

To live in a democracy is not easy. The freeborn adult male citizens of fifth-century Athens were obliged to accept responsibility for their own destinies. There was no tyrant whom they could reproach for their misfortunes, no fatherly autocrat on whom they could rely for protection. They were expected to participate in the making of crucial policy decisions. If those decisions proved to have been bad ones, there was no person or institution outside of themselves that the citizens could blame for their ill consequences. Nor was there any all-powerful authority who could erase their mistakes and comfort them in their troubles. Many people, in Athens in Alcibiades’ lifetime as well as in the numerous later democracies where demagogues have become dictators, longed to be reduced once more to the condition of infancy, to be made free of the wearisome responsibilities of independent adulthood.