Heroes: Saviours, Traitors and Supermen. Lucy Hughes-Hallett
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friends, including one of his cousins, did he feel safe enough to land. He came ashore surrounded by a bodyguard ready to fight off any attempt at arresting him.
His caution must quickly have given way to triumph. His return was greeted with wild scenes of celebration. This homecoming was his apotheosis, the moment when the Athenians received him as though he were one of Plato’s men of gold, a quasi-divine hero who could lead them forward to a glittering future. A vast crowd, near-hysterical with joy, had gathered on the waterfront. According to Diodorus Siculus, ‘all men thronged to the harbour to catch sight of Alcibiades, the slaves vying with the free so that the city was entirely deserted’. The entire crowd, alight with enthusiasm, escorted him back into the city, yelling out their exultation as they went. People struggled to get close enough to embrace him and to crown him with garlands. Many wept ‘for they reflected that they would never have suffered the Sicilian disaster or any of their terrible disappointments if only they had left Alcibiades in command’; but their regrets were mingled with rejoicing, for according to Diodorus, ‘practically all men believed’ that with his return from exile ‘great fortune had come again to the city’.
Carried on the wave of the jubilant throng, Alcibiades made his way to the Pnyx, where he spoke to the full Assembly. He was a magnificent figure, his beauty, according to Plutarch, being as great in the prime of his manhood as it had been when he was a boy, ‘lending him extraordinary grace and charm’. He was also a brilliant player on others’ emotions. Shrewdly, he chose to be magnanimous, to blame no one for his exile. Instead, with tears in his eyes, he spoke of ‘ill-fortune’ and the ‘evil genius that had dogged his career’. Many listeners wept. Others cried out angrily, just as if, remarks Cornelius Nepos drily, ‘it had been another people, and not those who were then shedding tears, that had condemned him for impiety’. He ended his speech with rousing optimism, promising Athens a splendid future. His audience applauded ecstatically. His confiscated property was restored to him. The stele recording his disgrace was taken down from the Acropolis and thrown into the sea. The priests were commanded to solemnly revoke the curses they had once cast on him. He was crowned with a golden crown and appointed general with absolute authority by land and sea (a title which only his guardian Pericles had held before him). For years – in Sparta, in Sardis, in Samos – he had been claiming superhuman powers for himself. Now, at last, unreal as it still was, that claim was believed by his compatriots. Alcibiades was acclaimed throughout the city as the man who could make Athens great once more.
The extravagant joy that attended his homecoming was followed by an even more impressive demonstration of his rehabilitation. The grandest spectacle of the Athenian religious calendar was the procession that escorted the sacred objects and the image of the god Iacchus from Athens to Eleusis, some fourteen miles away, for the annual celebration of the Mysteries. The marchers included young men about to be initiated, initiates wreathed with myrtle and long-robed priests. Bands of flute players, dancers, and hymn-singing choirs accompanied the procession, which halted frequently along the route to make sacrifices and to perform sacred rites. Holiday and awe-inspiring spectacle at once, the ceremony held profound significance for all Athenians, but for several years it had not taken place. The presence of the Spartan garrison at Dekelea in the mountains overlooking the route had rendered it too dangerous. Instead, Iacchus had been carried by boat to Eleusis with a small escort and none of the usual attendant ceremony, a compromise sadly emblematic of Athens’ reduced and endangered condition.
Alcibiades – the traitor who had advised the Spartans to fortify Dekelea, the blasphemer who had repeatedly made a mock of the Eleusinian Mysteries and who had been condemned to death for doing so – seized the chance to demonstrate his reformation with an operation exactly designed to erase his past sins. Scrupulously devout now, he first consulted the priests before announcing, with their approval, that the procession would take place. He posted look-outs on the hilltops all along the route, sent out an advance guard at daybreak to clear the way and then, surrounding the procession with his troops, escorted it to Eleusis and back. Had King Agis led out an attacking force from Dekelea Alcibiades would have been able to make a parade of his military skills and his loyalty, fighting, in sight of all Athens, to defend the sacred mysteries. As it was, the procession went and returned unmolested. The participants had walked, according to Plutarch, ‘in solemn order and complete silence’. Throughout the thirty-mile journey they must have been in a state of mingled terror and exaltation. When they returned safely to the city their relief, and that of the watching citizens, was expressed in further outbursts of rapturous acclaim for Alcibiades. The poorer classes especially were convulsed by an ‘extraordinary passion’ for him. The troops were exultant, boasting once again that under his command they were invincible. The one-time blasphemer was hailed as ‘a high priest and an initiator into the Mysteries’. It seemed there was nothing he could not do.
To live in a democracy is not easy. The freeborn adult male citizens of fifth-century Athens were obliged to accept responsibility for their own destinies. There was no tyrant whom they could reproach for their misfortunes, no fatherly autocrat on whom they could rely for protection. They were expected to participate in the making of crucial policy decisions. If those decisions proved to have been bad ones, there was no person or institution outside of themselves that the citizens could blame for their ill consequences. Nor was there any all-powerful authority who could erase their mistakes and comfort them in their troubles. Many people, in Athens in Alcibiades’ lifetime as well as in the numerous later democracies where demagogues have become dictators, longed to be reduced once more to the condition of infancy, to be made free of the wearisome responsibilities of independent adulthood.
In Athens political debate was urgent, incessant, bafflingly inconclusive. The political process was obstructed and complicated at every turn by envy, corruption, and blackmail. The tenure of any office was brief. There was no certainty, no continuity, no easy-going reliance on precedent. Every principle, and every practical detail, was to be debated and voted upon. This edgy insistence on examining every question afresh each time it arose is one of the things that made Athens so exhilarating a society and gave it its extraordinary intellectual and political vitality. But it imposed a burden on the citizens that exasperated or frightened many, and which others found simply too great to bear. In the summer of 408 BC, when Alcibiades descended on Athens surrounded by the golden aura of the conquering hero, as splendid as one of those godlike men whom Aristotle judged fully entitled to enslave their fellows, there were many who entertained the fantasy of surrendering their exhausting freedom to him. People came to him and begged him to ‘rid them of those loud-mouthed wind-bags who were the bane of the city’, to silence the ceaseless, bewildering play of argument and counter-argument for which the entire city was the stage by seizing absolute power. In an extraordinary frenzy of self-abasement, people begged him to make himself dictator, to ‘sweep away decrees and laws as he thought fit’, to overturn the constitution and wipe out all opposition, thus relieving the demoralized and insecure citizens of the awful burden of their liberty.
Alcibiades did not respond to the invitation. He had work to do elsewhere. The Spartan fleet under its formidable new commander Lysander was lying at Ephesus, a menace to the Athenian colonies. The Assembly granted Alcibiades all the men and ships he required, even allowing him the unprecedented honour of choosing his own fellow generals. Their generosity was expressive of the people’s adulation of their new commander-in-chief. Besides, the Assembly’s more thoughtful members were probably anxious to speed him on his way. ‘We do not know what Alcibiades himself thought of a dictatorship,’ writes Plutarch, ‘but certainly the leading citizens at this time were frightened of it.’ They mistook their man. The insatiable ambition Socrates had seen in his disciple was not for stay-at-home executive power, but for world-bestriding glory. Soon after the Eleusinian festival, just four months after he had entered the city, Alcibiades left Athens for ever.
He had seduced the people and alarmed the leading democrats, but he had not won over the gods. The day on which he landed in Athens to be so rapturously