“Sling there, Lysander!” Alcibiades bellowed, indicating Prince Cyrus. “Sling there and stand with Leonidas!”
He meant of course the Spartan king who had fallen with such valor at Thermopylae, two generations past, defending Greece from the Persian.
Lysander frothed with fury. “Can you court the crowd even now, thou actor!”
“He is here, thy king Leonidas-and marks thou traitor to Greece!”
Our marines made a last rush for Cyrus. Missiles rained from ships and seawall; prince and knights fell back. uKili him!”
Antiochus trumpeted above the melee. The youth gave place toward the Pteron's end, driven by the Athenian press.
“Men of Persia,” Cyrus cried in his tongue (or so it was translated for us later), “it is up to you now to decide if your prince will live or die.”
Without a heartbeat's demurral Cyrus' champions flung themselves and their steeds upon the spearpoints of the Athenians, driving these back by their magnificent sacrifice and creating an interval for their master. Cyrus spurred. Prince and mount broke through, lapped in deliverance by the bronze of Spartan knights.
Here came the terminal push. Mass against mass, each division straining to hurl the other into the sea. All utterance ceased. Men did not shout or even groan. Even the horses no longer made cry, but that sound arose which constrains all who have known battle to start from their slumber in terror.
The foe were too many, we too few.
We fell back. The ships took us off. The assault was over.
Alcibiades got off aboard Tyche. Men pressed about him, Antiochus recounted to me later, motioning toward the conflagration and acclaiming his triumph.
He rejoined nothing at that hour. Only past dawn ashore at Samos, bathed and bound by the surgeons, did he summon to his side, in confidence and apart, Adeimantus, Aristocrates, Antiochus, Mantitheus, and myself. We must take thought now, he admonished, for our lives apart from him.
“With this night,” he said, “my star has fallen.” There is an anecdote of Lysander in the aftercourse of the battle. It is recounted that on remuster at the Artemisium, when reports accounted forty-four of eighty-seven triremes burned or destroyed, with the shipyards, repair works, and all construction ramparts of the Pteron, he was confronted not alone by Prince Cyrus, who must account the produce of his father's gold, but by representatives of the Spartan ephorate, technically his superiors, who chanced to be present from the home government.
“And what do you call this, Lysander?” these officers demanded of their admiral, indicating the ruin of the port.
“I call it what it is,” Lysander is said to have replied. “Victory.”
XLII
These journals of the younger Pericles [Grandfather continued] it has been my honor to preserve, along with this ensign of Calliope, sacrificed subsequently in the fight at the Blue Rocks, and Endeavor, whose helm was his at the Arginousai Islands. This was the last command he ever held. But such, my grandson, we shall get to presently.
To return to Polemides, whom we left at the inception of the raid. He had successfully fled Ephesus, he told me, exploiting darkness and the disorder wrought by the assault. His burns and their attendant shock caught up with him, however, in the country south of the city. He must seek cover.
In the raid's wake Lysander's coast guard had doubled watches and patrols. Rewards were posted for all stragglers of the Athenians; locals, boys, and even women swelled the manhunts.
Polemides survived on the flesh of mice and lizards spiked in the canals in which he had gone to ground, and leeks and radishes grubbed at night from the kitchen gardens of housedames.
Warships of Athens transited on night reconnaissance; he made signal and once attempted swimming out, but his strength failed.
He hid, he said, like a rat.
The term of his bride Aurore came and went. He had a child now or so presumed, but did not dare daylight, seeking a ship or even to post a letter. Though he declined as ever to confide to me such as he deemed overpersonal, it took scant imagination to conceive his distress, in terror for his life, whose preservation he now sought most desperately for the sake of his bride and child; with the consternation of being unable to reach her side for the birth; and the grief he had occasioned her, who could not know if he even still drew breath.
I was at Athens then. The city was sobered and chastened, groaning awake with a hangover from its bout of passion with Alcibiades. As a respectable matron recinches her girdle and reclaims her dignity after the excesses of the Dionysia, so did the city of Athena shudder and splash its face, embracing collective amnesia. Did we really say that? Do that? Promise that? Those who had capered most shamelessly to their new master's pipes now came to themselves and, repenting this license, snapped out to the bracing chill of abjuration. So that, the more abjectly a man had groveled for Alcibiades' favor or donated resources to his cause, the more he now affected indifference and swore himself superior to such slavishness.
As men reckoned how near they had come to forfeiting their freedom, their resolve redoubled never to hazard such derangement again. The oligarchic element closed ranks, fearing the mania of the multitude; the democrats scourged themselves for their eagerness to offer up their liberty. The mob's code was as concise as it was common: any shoot lifting its head beyond another must be mown down. The new radicals, championed by Cleophon, would not prostrate themselves before Alcibiades or anoint any omnipotent over themselves, the sovereign people.
It became clear now to what extent Alcibiades' rule had depended on his personal presence. The main of his ministers had embarked with him with the fleet, while those who remained-Euryptolemus, Diotimus, Pantithenes-possessed no specific program or philosophy to implement. Alcibiades had left the city with no agenda other than its adulation of himself, and without his celebrity about which to construct a consensus, a vacuum arose. Into this flooded his enemies.
Dispatches detailing the raid at Ephesus, considered a great victory, failed to ignite the city's joy. Daily from the fleet arrived pleas for money. I served then on the Board of Naval Procurement.
We were ten, one from each tribe, with an epistates, a presiding officer, serving each day in rotation. Only myself and Patrocles, son of the officer of the same name who had perished in Sicily, voted faithfully to fund the fleet. Our colleagues resisted, from legitimate concerns of economy but primarily under pressure from the foes of Alcibiades: to strangle him of cash and bring him down.
Formerly correspondence was received by the board only from the Curators of the Yards or the College of Architects, the Ten Generals, or the tribal taxiarchs. Now we admitted appeals, twenty a day, from squadron commanders and even boatswains and marines, begging for money. Here, a motion proposing citizenship for all aliens who manned benches with the fleet. Now a plea to slave owners, who had let out their chattel as oarsmen, to forgo their commission, permitting wages to the man “on the stick,” to hold him from deserting. Then a petition to enfranchise these as well.
Now Alcibiades' enemies' hundred suits at law began to take their toll. Each associate, as Polemides, accused of commerce with the foe added another razor's nick. Why had Alcibiades failed to take Ephesus? What other than his friendship with Endius and past association with Lysander? His enemies seized this moment to put abroad Alcibiades' scheme for league with Lacedaemon against the Persians. What could this be but a device to sell out the city to the foe?
In my own family debate protracted, of fear for the nation.
Ruinous as was the intemperance of the radical democrats, one dreaded their accession little less than that of Alcibiades. A figure on his scale, even a noble one, emasculated the internal intercourse of the state. Even those who loved him, or like myself acclaimed him as a commander and man of vision, came to fear his return, with victories or without.