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

them, giving them, as Thucydides remarks drily, ‘a very exaggerated idea 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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