The Historians' History of the World 03

The retreat of the Athenian fleet acknowledged the naval superiority of the enemy; a superiority which was alone sufficient either to acquire or to maintain the submission of the neighbouring coasts and islands. In other respects too, the Peloponnesians enjoyed the most decisive advantages. Their galleys were victualled, their soldiers were paid by Tissaphernes, and they daily expected a reinforcement of a hundred and fifty Phœnician ships. But, in this dangerous crisis, fortune seemed to respect the declining age of Athens, and, by a train of accidents, singular and almost incredible, enabled Alcibiades, so long the misfortune and the scourge, to become the defence and the saviour of his country.

Greek Sandals

ALCIBIADES AGAIN TO THE FORE

[415-412 B.C.]

During his long residence in Sparta, Alcibiades assumed the outward gravity of deportment, and conformed himself to the spare diet, and laborious exercises, which prevailed in that austere republic; but his character and his principles remained as licentious as ever. His intrigue with Timæa, the spouse of king Agis, was discovered by an excess of female levity. The queen, vain of the attachment of so celebrated a character, familiarly gave the name of Alcibiades to her son Leotychides; a name which, first confined to the privacy of her female companions, was soon spread abroad in the world. Alcibiades punished her folly by a most mortifying but well-merited declaration, boasting that he had solicited her favours from no other motive but that he might indulge the ambitious desire of giving a king to Sparta. The offence itself, and the shameless avowal, still more provoking than the offence, excited the keenest resentment in the breast of the injured husband. The magistrates and generals of Sparta, jealous of the fame, and envious of the merit of a stranger, readily sympathised with the misfortune, and encouraged the revenge of Agis; and, as the horrid practice of assassination was still disgracing the manners of Greece, orders were sent to Astyochus, who commanded in chief the Peloponnesian forces in Asia, secretly to destroy Alcibiades, whose power defied those laws which in every Grecian republic condemned adulterers to death. But the active and subtile Athenian had secured too faithful domestic intelligence in the principal families of Sparta to become the victim of this execrable design. With his usual address he eluded all the snares of Astyochus: his safety, however, required perpetual vigilance and caution, and he determined to escape from the situation, which subjected him to such irksome restraint.

Publicly banished from Athens, secretly persecuted by Sparta, he had recourse to the friendship of Tissaphernes, who admired his accomplishments, and respected his abilities, which, though far superior in degree, were similar in kind to his own. Tissaphernes was of a temper the more readily to serve a friend, in proportion as he less needed his services. Alcibiades, therefore, carefully concealed from him the dangerous resentment of the Spartans. In the selfish breast of the Persian no attachment could be durable unless founded on interest; and Alcibiades, who had deeply studied his character, began to flatter his avarice, that he might insure his protection. He informed him, that by allowing the Peloponnesian sailors a drachma, or sevenpence sterling, of daily pay, he treated them with a useless and even dangerous liberality: that the pay given by the Athenians, even in the most flourishing times, amounted only to three oboli. Should the sailors prove dissatisfied with this equitable reduction, the Grecian character afforded an easy expedient for silencing their licentious clamours. It would be sufficient to bribe the naval commanders and a few mercenary orators, and the careless and improvident seamen would submit, without suspicion, the rate of their pay, as well as every other concern, to the influence and the authority of those who were accustomed to govern them.

Tissaphernes heard this advice with all the attention of an avaricious man to every proposal for saving his money; and so true a judgment had Alcibiades formed of the Greeks, that Hermocrates the Syracusan was the only officer who disdained, meanly and perfidiously, to betray the interest of the men under his command: yet through the influence of his colleagues, the plan of economy was universally adopted.

The intrigues of Alcibiades sowed jealousy and distrust in the Peloponnesian fleet: they alienated the minds of the troops both from Tissaphernes and from their commanders: the Persian was ready to forsake those whom he had learned to despise; and Alcibiades profited by this disposition to insinuate that the alliance of the Lacedæmonians was equally expensive and inconvenient for the Great King and his lieutenants.