Heroes: Saviours, Traitors and Supermen. Lucy Hughes-Hallett
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 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 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 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 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 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