“Shall we go on now?’ said Thibron. ‘If they’re chasing us they’ll be miles behind still, because my friends were going to hold up the pursuit, but I want to get you out to the farm before it gets too hot.’
To my shame it was only then that a sudden thought occurred to me. ‘Thibron,’ I said. ‘Am I the only one to be rescued? I couldn’t think clearly back in the city, but if I’m the only one, I really can’t bear—’
‘No, No!’ cried Thibron energetically. ‘It’s quite all right, Lycius! We were going to rescue as many as we could, and those we couldn’t we’ve clubbed together to buy. Much more profitable to the city than the public slaves doing hard labour.’
‘But why?’
His big, earnest eyes fixed themselves half bewilderedly on my face. ‘Why? Because of Euripides,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘I thought you understood. You can talk to us about his plays, recite his poetry—’
I began to laugh. He became very worried, thinking I was hysterical. But I told him it was just plain laughter—no, not evoked by him, I hastened to add, because he looked hurt, but because of the Spartans. I felt Athens had managed to score over them again. All that a Spartan could ever chant by heart was a drill-manual, and I couldn’t think of anyone risking his neck for the privilege of hearing a grating voice grind out barrack-square commands.
And then, very haltingly, I began to thank him.
38
‘... returned to their homes’
So, I suppose, I come to the end of the story of the Expedition to Syracuse. That end came only eleven years ago, yet once in a while one might think the story is as far back in history as the tale of Troy. Everything has changed so much, so fast, that it is hard to make oneself realise that to so many people already Alcibiades is just a name, Euripides a manuscript, Pericles a—a theory, I suppose, that some think disastrous.
It was late autumn before I was really recovered; fever, starvation, broken spirits take long to cure. I had written letters to my grandfather and Tecmessa, and Conon knew now that Glaucon was dead. And I wrote another letter. It was oddly difficult thanking Euripides for the way in which he had twice saved me; when it came to the point I could only do it as if I were laughing, though the tears in my eyes were not tears of laughter.
‘I know my exact worth now, Euripides, can tell you the precise number of obols I’m valued at. Just the number of obols people in Athens are paying for your latest play. If people in Syracuse had been able to get hold of your most recent work, I’d have been dead long ago.’
I had ascertained that, incredibly, the situation of the City was not so desperate as might be feared. The pick of our crews had gone to Syracuse, men who were irreplaceable. Out of the thirty thousand well trained men in our navy, twenty-four thousand had been lost here—never had a state suffered such losses, with both quality and quantity gone—and at the very moment that the Treasury was becoming exhausted, somehow the state had to find the means to build fresh ships, hire foreign sailors. Yet Athens still defied Sparta and Sparta’s allies. She had been saved directly after Syracuse because her enemies simply could not believe her navy had gone, and if Sparta, re-entering the war directly at last, had ever hoped to capture the City—well, the Long Walls still rose up to greet invaders. There was always that element of reality in the plans of Pericles that would outlast any of the heady dreams of an Alcibiades.
So our enemies were concentrating on the Ionian Islands and coast instead.
The turn of the year found me on the slopes of Etna, approaching Catana, where there was still an Athenian garrison—above all, Catana to which Callistratus had led his command to safety. Catana had been very good to all the fugitives who had sought shelter there the previous autumn. We had kept a body of troops there since the beginning of the Sicilian campaign, commanded by Tydeus, Lamachus’ son.
When I myself went to Catana, and met members of Callistratus’ cavalry squadron, I said what had been in my mind for months.
‘There’s been an Athenian force here for over a year, and they’ve done nothing?’
‘I know what you mean,’ said Polycrates, who had done frontier duty with me. ‘Why didn’t Tydeus raid the quarries? The guards weren’t strong at the end of the time, were they?’
‘They couldn’t stand the smell,’ I said. ‘Perhaps Tydeus had a delicate nose too.’
‘There’s been a lot of bad feeling about it. Trouble started even before we knew about the quarries—we felt that if he’d come out to bring in what fugitives he could, a lot more would have—have made it to Catana.’
‘Why didn’t he?’
‘It’s his father. He blamed Nicias for his father’s death; he said he’d see Nicias in hell before he got him out of his scrape.’
After a moment—‘Well, I suppose it’s interesting to think that someone looks on the retreat as a scrape,’ I said with an effort. ‘Did it never occur to him that a lot of others would follow Nicias to one kind of hell or another—’
Polycrates said, ‘He’s stupid, and he’s bitterly jealous. Watch out for him, Lycius.’
Twenty minutes later a big, black-bearded fellow came up to me with heavy tread as I talked to a mixed group of Athenian fugitives and citizens of the town, tapped me imperiously on the shoulder, and said, ‘A word with you. At once.’ Then he stalked away again.
Polycrates said, ‘You’re not going, are you?’
‘Yes, I’ll go,’ I said grimly. ‘The sooner I get over my first—and last—interview with him, the better.’
I felt the time had come for a little plain speaking where Tydeus was concerned. I knew the others had done their best, but their remarks would lack the edge given mine by my stay in the quarries.
So I followed him to the house where he had had his headquarters all this time, to be asked why I had not reported sooner.
I returned as gratingly as Gylippus himself: ‘You, of course, Tydeus, are an expert on prompt attention to duty. You let thousands of us rot and die in the stone quarries for months without lifting a finger to save us.’
He shouted, ‘I had only a small force here! Do you expect me to be a miracle-worker?’
I said, ‘A handful of Syracusan boys rescued us and got us away from the heart of their city, not bothering about whether they were going to work miracles or not. You’ve twice as many armed men here under your command, and, some people might think, a greater incentive to attempt a rescue.’
‘I warn you to be careful,’ he said. ‘You’re speaking to a superior officer.’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Like your cousin!’ he shouted.
‘I wasn’t thinking of my cousin,’ I said. ‘I’m thinking of another relative. My uncle was my superior officer. I’m appealing for volunteers to do what he would have done in your place.’
He banged his fist down on the table, and was still shouting as I went out. It was seven years before I spoke to him again; I have sometimes wondered wretchedly if things would have turned out differently on this second occasion if I had tried to conciliate him on the first, but I doubt it. At the time of the second meeting, he was already committed to the course he would follow.
Our task was to rescue the survivors of the quarries whom Thibron and his friends had been unable to save. Those not so lucky, who had first done hard labour at the prison, and then passed into private ownership, either by public auction, or, as it were, ‘embezzlement’ by officials, nearly always had a hard time. One of these was Ariston; he had been recaptured a mile or so outside the town and, after a spell at the prison, was appropriated by one of the prison officials.
His master disliked him intensely, chiefly on the grounds that he looked rebellious; as far as Ariston could make out, this simply meant he didn’t look servile enough, in other words, held his head high and looked people straight in the face. So he was sent off to the little family farm they had outside the city, and his owner commenced a campaign to induce him to look and feel like the slave he was. They made him l
ive and work in filth, they were always beating him. When he had the time and energy to think, he would tell himself that his only hope was to make himself feel like an animal, accepting the filth as natural, but something inside him would always revolt against this, would cry out he was not an animal, and he would go sneaking off in search of water to wash himself, and be caught, and beaten.
We actually rescued him the night after such a beating; he was lying on a pile of dirty straw talking to himself, being lightheaded with pain and hunger and fatigue. I must say he was babbling in the most extraordinary fashion, talking of Hellenic Empires and petty local rivalries; it was the most eerie thing hearing such ideas, expressed in that inextinguishably well-bred Athenian voice, coming from this filthy, blood-stained bag of bones. For a moment I realised how Alcibiades must have felt on seeing me.
When he was a little recovered, we asked him if he had any idea who had sent us a message telling us where to find him, who had been the owner of the Thracian slave who had come to the gate of Catana shortly before nightfall, tossed a letter to one of our people standing guard there, and slipped away into the shadows before he could be questioned.
The writer of the message had not signed himself. He merely said that an Athenian called Ariston was being beaten very badly at a farm—and then gave directions as to how the farm might be found.
Ariston made a guess. He was still very shaky, and was extremely agitated because he had forgotten the name of his saviour, although he remembered the actual man well enough. He was the general who had been exiled, he said.
‘Not Alcibiades!’ I said blankly. I simply could not believe it. He might risk his neck for the sake of his own cousin—for reasons of family pride in the high and mighty Alcmaeonid clan—but I could not see him performing good deeds for Athenians in general.
Ariston grinned faintly up at me.
‘Oh I shouldn’t forget his name,’ he said. ‘No, this man was sent to guard some place or other, made a mess of it, and has been paying for it ever since.’
‘So he came to Syracuse to gloat over what was happening to us?’
Ariston looked really shocked. ‘Now you’re thinking like my late owner,’ he protested. ‘No, this man came because he’s thinking of writing a history of the War, and he wanted to collect material. The Syracusans, like you, thought he’d react to exile in a—an Alcibiadean way, so they feted him, fussed over him, gave him all the honoured visitor treatment. My master, seeing he still looked solemn, thought, in his hospitable manner, that there was one sure way of cheering him up—let him attend one of his private beating-up parties. After which I was kicked, and told to give the visitor all the information he required. Then we were left together.’
He paused. ‘Well?’ I prompted after a moment.
‘I was seeing his face again,’ said Ariston slowly. ‘Such an odd expression. Not as warm—I mean human—as pity, compassion, anything like that. I’d just collapsed but as I grovelled there in the dust, I thought, even then, “That’s how a god would look at human suffering. He hates it, but—” ’
‘The look of a good historian?’ I said savagely.
‘Perhaps. And don’t think I resented it. He was wonderfully good to me. He wiped my face, and helped me to sit up and—and talked to me as if I had a mind. You know what it can be like being a slave in Syracuse—all that you get to care about is having enough to eat and avoiding being beaten. I couldn’t have been more animal—and not too cleanly an animal, either—than I was then. But I sat on the ground and forgot the blood and the bruises, and when he said I needn’t answer his questions, I said I didn’t mind. And indeed I didn’t, it was like answering the questions of a good doctor, and when he began to talk I listened to all he said, and felt it mattered.’
‘What did he say?’
‘That he must suppress his personal feelings—and he does feel, Lycius: he was a friend of your uncle, did you know that?—to write the true history of the War, because it’s going to be either the end of something great or the beginning of something greater.’
‘He sounds like Alcibiades addressing the mob.’
‘No, no!’ said Ariston energetically. ‘It’s bigger than that, there’s far more than the fate of a dozen Greek states involved in all this, and it’s so much more important than the Persian wars because of the moral danger—’
But here, thinking he was becoming dangerously excited, I stopped him.
39
Two Summonses
Polycrates asked me one day if I realised that they were making speeches about me at Athens. ‘For salvage work,’ he continued, as I stared. Well, I suppose it was just as well that one Alcmaeonid was saving Athenian lives.
I loathed the time I spent in Catana; I became obsessed by a rocky promontory overlooking the bay. Ariston, finding me there one day, asked the reason. I said, ‘It was at Catana that my cousin had the order for his recall, wasn’t it? He was coming back from that preliminary reconnaissance of Syracuse, so it was here that his ship rounded the point, and saw Salaminia. He knew what that meant, and switched his plans. As I see it, this is the most significant spot in Athenian history.’
Not that I had much time for moping on the cliff; there were plenty of Syracusan attacks to drive back, counter-raids into enemy territory. I sent off all my spoils to the Treasury at home, but the officials there would take only the customary tenth.
When Catana was safe, I went to join Conon in western waters. Thank God I was with Conon when amazing news of my cousin reached us.
Sparta was hit by the biggest scandal since Paris stayed with Menelaus—history, in fact, repeated itself, for this Paris too skipped out of the way before Menelaus’ return. Not that he took his Helen with him, though—but then, as I had gathered in Syracuse, he found her boring.
He got wind that Agis, who had never liked him, was coming back from Decelea in a hurry: he had to give himself an excuse to get out of Sparta in double-quick time, so he persuaded the Spartans to send an expedition against our ally, Chios, he himself being part of the expedition, of course. I found that he could still surprise me. It was not enough to send Agis to Decelea and wreck the Expedition; in order to save his neck he was ready to destroy the Empire.
Agis’ pride could not allow publication of the real reason for his return. He had Alcibiades condemned to death in his absence, for being ‘unreliable’—a typical Spartan understatement.
Again Alcibiades got away in time. A drunken friend, Antiochus, turned up opportunely, and took him over into Asia, upcountry to Sardis, to the court of Tissaphernes, the Persian Governor of the Ionian Provinces.
We were at sea when all this reached us; staring through the rain and mist, I asked Conon, ‘Who’s he going to turn Tissaphernes against?’
‘Sparta,’ Conon said without hesitation. ‘He loathed us, because we dared condemn him to death, but that the lumpish oafs he despises should do the same . . .’
I nodded slowly. ‘Besides,’ went on Conon evenly, ‘he’s always meant to go back to Athens, you know. Three years ago it was to be at the head of a conquering Spartan army, now . . .’
‘Now?’
Conon said deliberately, ‘If he turns Persia against Sparta, should we not be so grateful we’d ask him politely to come back?’
‘Not after Sicily!’ I said.
‘God help us, Lycius, there aren’t many men in Athens with first-hand knowledge of what defeat there meant. The rest have short memories. In any case, it all comes to this—is it better to have him on your side, or against you?’
That question was speedily answered. Athens wanted Alcibiades back, especially after it became known that he’d turned Tissaphernes against Sparta, as Conon had predicted. Even before Athens had made up its collective mind, our fleet stationed at Samos had invited my cousin to take over command. He accepted the invitation, came down from Sardis, crossed the narrow stretch of water to Samos—and from Samos he wrote to me, asking me to join him there. The sky would be the limit f
or me—under his command.
I answered briefly, ‘The last time you held an Athenian command, a limestone quarry was the limit as far as most people were concerned.’
In due course, he wrote again, chiding me for behaving like a spoilt child.
‘You’re very unforgiving,’ he ended lightly.
My reply was short. ‘Since when have you found it easy to forgive?’ I scribbled, and I hoped that as he read it, the shadow of the past years rose up before him.
Well, he had welcome enough at Samos, so perhaps my letter didn’t sting him much. Then off he went to the north-east, to recover colonies and allies that had fallen away, and regain control of the approach to the Black Sea. Alcibiades was restoring our Empire, sure enough, but I didn’t think he would restore our liberty.
And finally he had returned to Athens—to a reception more rapturous than had ever been accorded Pericles—and from Athens he wrote to me again asking me to join him in his next campaign. He gave me an airy description of his triumphal return; ‘I wished you’d been flanking me then, because at first I couldn’t tell whether the immense crowds were friendly or not, and until I could hear them cheering, I confess my heart was thumping so loudly I wonder that swine Agis couldn’t hear it at Decelea. Still, I put on a show of confidence that deceived everyone, and now, Lycius, now Athens is mine, as never before!’
My first impulse was to send no answer, my second to reply bitterly, ‘Yes, yours as never before, with Nicias dead, and all those others you and he killed between you!’ But in the end I wrote again to him. Why? Because he was in that mood of soaring confidence that had possessed him before Syracuse—and because again, as before Syracuse, his fate involved that of Athens.
I wrote back, ‘I shall not come to Athens as long as you’re basking in your welcome—but don’t let that welcome go to your head.’
The Road to Sardis Page 28