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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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: ‘