Pericles' passing must create a vacuum, Alcibiades declared, which would stand the empire on its head. Subject states will revolt, would-be successors scurry from the woodwork.
Euryptolemus cut him off, indignant. How could Alcibiades speak so coldly of his kinsman, who if the gods grant may live on another half year, or even survive as no inconsiderable number had already?
“He won't make it,” Alcibiades pronounced. “I read it all over him. Nor am I cold, cousin, but only forethoughtful, as he was and would wish us to be. Whom do we want in his place-that truckler to the rabble, Cleon? Androcles, who couldn't mount from the gutter with a stepladder? Or Nicias, whose pious vacillation is even more malign? Listen to me. If Athens possessed leaders of imagination, I would be the first to set myself at their service. But the worst are bullies and lickspittles, skilled only at manipulating the mob. The best, as Phormio and Demosthenes, are warriors; they will not soil their hands with politics. What dies with Pericles is vision. But even he has not seen far enough. The Plague will end, we will survive it. What then?
“Pericles ordained as indefeasible three tenets for the prosecution of this war: the preeminence of the fleet, the security of the Long Walls, and the proscription of the empire's expansion while the war goes on. The first two stand sound; the third must be repealed. We have no choice but to expand, and with unprecedented vigor. Our ships must carry conquest to Sicily and Italy, then Carthage and all of North Africa. In Asia we must not content ourselves with a toehold on the coast, but advance inland and take on all comers, including the throne of Persia.”
Euryptolemus broke in with a laugh. “How will we conquer the world, cousin, when we can't even step down from our walls to take a piss? What myriads will we employ to accomplish this masterwork?”
“The Spartans in the end,” Alcibiades replied as if this were self-evident. “First their allies, once we have overthrown their declining generation and drawn their young men to our league.”
He was serious. “But here, friends, is the question: dare I speak in public to this effect? I am not yet twenty-five, in a nation where forty years is held the threshold of wisdom. To keep back runs counter to every impulse of my nature, but to strike prematurely may finish me before I begin. You cannot know the nights I've lain awake, tormented by this.”
Plates grew cold as the cousins examined the case.
Euryptolemus spoke. This noble, though blessed with an intellect as keen as his kinsman, had been gifted with little of his good looks.
Aged twenty-nine, he had already lost most of his hair, and his features, though not uncomely, did not conjoin to a union that one could call handsome. Perhaps because of this, he bore himself with a genial and felicitous modesty. It was impossible not to like the fellow, and to like him at once. He began by reproving his cousin for the lawlessness of his private life.
Alcibiades, if he wished to be taken seriously, must bring his appetites under control, particularly for drink and carnality. Such vices are unstatesmanlike. "If you can't keep your cock on a leash, at least be discreet about where you stick it. Don't troop about the streets with courtesans while your wife languishes heartsick at home.”
Two forces are at war for Athens' soul, Euryptolemus asserted.
“The ancient simple ways which reverence the gods and heroes of old-and the new ways which make the city herself a god. We all know which side you come down on, cousin, but you must not make it so obvious. Would it kill you to display humility, to render obeisance to heaven or at least make pretense of it? Democracy is a sword which cuts two ways. It emancipates the individual, setting him free to shine as no other scheme of governance. But that blade possesses an under-edge. Its spawn is spite and envy. This is why Pericles bore himself with modesty, remote from the multitude, for fear of their jealousy.”
“He was wrong,” Alcibiades put in.
“Was he? You occupy an Athens unknown to the commons, Alcibiades, a realm whose incandescence blinds you to the real state the rest inhabit, where mixing bowls overflow not with wine, but bile and gall. I see it every day in the law courts. Envy and spite are our city's biggest businesses and they boom in hard times or flush. Let us count the avenues the state has provided for the envious man to tear down his better. He may drag him before the Councilor the Assembly, into the people's courts or the Areopagus.
If his victim stands for office, he may test him upon application, then audit upon expiration. If the poor fellow serves with the fleet, his enemy may haul him up before the apostoleis or the Board of Naval Affairs. He may arrest him himself or have the magistrates do it, indict straight out, sue before the arbitrators, or lay information before the king archon. Nor does he lack for charges, of which the state provides a quiverful. Let him start with dereliction, peculation, malversation; bribery, larceny, extortion; malfeasance, misfeasance, nonfeasance. Do these fail? Try tax evasion, unlawful union, depletion of patrimony. Are murder and treason insufficient? Let him snatch the shaft of impiety, which carries the death penalty, and against which the accused must defend not only himself and his actions but the very content of his soul!
“You laugh, cousin. But consider Themistocles' end, our nation's savior, an exile in Persia. Peerless Aristides banished. Miltiades hounded to his grave, not two years after his victory at Marathon.
Pericles made his name prosecuting the greatest hero our city ever produced, Cimon, who chased the Persian from the sea and set the empire upon its foundations; while he, the Olympian himself, barely escaped with his neck on half a dozen occasions. And you, cousin. What a target you present! By the gods, let me get you before a jury.” He gestured to the pack of worshipers who yet loitered, gawking from the margins of the terrace. “I'll have these same idolaters howling for your blood.”
The kinsmen laughed, seconded by the spectators, who could not but overhear this mock tirade of Euryptolemus.
“I applaud your eloquence, cousin,” Alcibiades resumed. “But you're mistaken. You misapprehend the character of man. No soul seeks to bemire itself in its own base fluids but to ascend on the wings of that daimon which animates it. Look there to the marines and infantry upon the embarkation quays. They are quickened not by bile or choler, but by heart's blood. They seek glory, no less than Theseus or Achilles.”
“Half of them are draft dodgers and you know it.”
“Only for want of vision by their leaders.”
“Cousin, the days of gods and heroes are over.”
“Not to me. And not to them.”
Again Alcibiades indicated the troops below. “You censure me, cousin, insisting that I must claim a vision beyond my own fame and glory, or the same for our nation. There is nothing beyond fame and glory! They are the holiest and most exalted aspirations of the soul, for they comprise the longing for immortality, for transcendence of all inhering limits, which passion animates even the immortal gods.
“You impeach me further, Euro, of squandering my time with men of brilliance and splendid horses and hounds, rather than the commons which constitute our nation. But I have observed these same men, the ordinary and the middling-born, in the presence of such horses and dogs. They swarm, as bees to honey, about the great ones. Why? Is it not because they perceive in the nobility of these champions the intimation of that selfsame quality inchoate within their own breasts? Phrynichus has admonished, She is a wide bed who holds both democracy and empire, but he, too, stands in error. Democracy must be empire. The appetite that freedom ignites in the individual must be given an object commensurate to its greatness.”