The World

The boy brought up in Pericles’ house, Alcibiades, now thirty years old, had grown up so uncannily beautiful that ‘he was hunted by many women of noble family’ and ‘sought after by men too’. He was a fearless soldier: in an early war against Corinth, he was almost killed but was saved by Socrates, his sometime lover. Tutored by Socrates, Alcibiades was a superb speaker – even his lisp was charming – and he was a born showman, rich enough to lay on choruses for the people. He was also a prince of democracy. Socrates taught him that ‘Ethical virtue is the only thing that matters.’ But Alcibiades turned out to be a very bad pupil.

Growing up spoiled by birth and nature, Alcibiades, now elected strategos by a fascinated people, was sybaritic, wilful and narcissistic. He used his vanity as an argument for his own ambition. ‘It is perfectly fair,’ he explained to the people, ‘for a man who has a high opinion of himself not to be put on the same level as everyone else.’ If there was envy ‘for the magnificence in which I live my life’, that lifestyle was just a way to project Athenian glory. To announce his emergence into public life, ‘I entered seven chariots for the [Olympic] chariot race (more than any private individual before).’

In 416, strategos Alcibiades advocated a return to an even more ruthless war against Sparta: ‘If we don’t rule others, others will rule us.’ An appeal for help from a city in Sicily inspired him to demand the dispatch of an expedition. ‘This is the way we won our empire,’ he said. ‘We’ve reached a stage where we are forced to plan new conquests to hold on to what we have got’ – how every empire justifies its expansion. ‘We shall increase our power!’ The Athenians agreed.

Just before he left for Sicily, Athenians awoke to find the phalloi of the city’s Hermes statues smashed – sacrilege that was blamed on Alcibiades. He was recalled to stand trial. Realizing that he would be found guilty, he defected to Sparta. Without his talents, the Sicilian expedition was a catastrophe and Alcibiades swore vengeance on Athens. ‘I’ll let them know I am alive,’ he muttered. Democracy was ‘an obvious absurdity’. He conceived a devastating strategy for the Spartans: they built a fortress near Athens that made it impossible for Attican farmers to feed the city; all food had to be imported. But while in Sparta, Alcibiades seduced the wife of King Agis and, when exposed, he promised to negotiate a treaty with Persia to fund the war against Athens. Persia held the key.

Leading a Spartan fleet to Ionia, Alcibiades appealed to the Persian king Darius II, who had come to the throne after a spasm of familial homicide, aided by Parysatis, his sister-wife. When the Spartans ordered his killing, Alcibiades defected to Darius and advised him to wait out the war. His plan was to engineer his return to Athens , where a noble coup had temporarily overthrown democracy.

The Athenian navy, headquartered in Samos, more loyal to democracy, took power in Athens which then elected Alcibiades as commander. In 410, at Cyzicus, he won a total victory over the Spartans. After a streak of victories including the capture of Byzantion on the Bosphoros, vital for the supply of grain, Alcibiades returned in glory to Athens. He was pardoned, and elected strategos autokrator.

In 408, Darius II, faced with a victorious Athens, backed Sparta, funding its new fleet in return for a free hand in Asia Minor.

The Spartans routed the Athenian fleet when Alcibiades was visiting a nearby island. The Athenians blamed the insouciant playboy, who then fled to his castles on the Hellespont. The restored democracy was now desperate. The Spartans, having secured Persian cash and Macedonian timber, denying both to Athens, could now build a new fleet. When they sank Athens’s last fleet and cut off its grain, the metropolis was forced to surrender.

There was one loose end: Alcibiades was living in a Hellespontine castle with his mistress. The Spartans sent a hit squad, and he died fighting – the last of the Alcmaeonids.

THE POISON CONTEST OF PERSIA AND THE LITERARY HALITOSIS PLOT OF MACEDONIA

Spartan ascendancy was short. Athens restored its democracy, launching investigations into the military and moral disasters of the war. In this vicious showdown, the Athenians arrested Socrates, once tutor of Alcibiades. Socrates believed all humans must aspire to arete – virtuous excellence – while the alternative, ‘the unexamined life’, is ‘not worth living’. But those who insist on telling the truth to everyone are often unbearable. Perhaps Athenian potentates did not want their follies to be overexamined by this loquacious curmudgeon, and Socrates was tried and sentenced to death.^* The city swiftly recovered. Meanwhile Sparta dared to intervene in the politics of Persia, now dominated by one of the sharpest potentates produced by House Haxamanishiya.