by Tom Holt
When Alcibiades was about twelve or thirteen, his lover was no less a man than Pericles himself; and it was about the time of the Euboean crisis. Now Pericles, as you know, was faced with the problem of presenting his annual accounts, as General, to Assembly; there was a truly staggering sum for which Pericles could find no explanation which he could give to the Athenians without ending up on the wrong side of half a pint of the best hemlock. At the time, then, he was terribly worried about this, and even talked about it in his sleep.
Now Alcibiades has always liked to get his full six hours, or even more if possible, and he found this extremely upsetting. So one night, as Pericles was lying there muttering, ‘I must find some way of giving my accounts, I must find some way of giving my accounts,’ Alcibiades shook him by the shoulder and woke him up.
‘You’re looking at this from the wrong angle,’ he said. ‘What you’ve got to find is some way of not giving your accounts.’
Pericles said something memorable, like ‘Shut up and go to sleep,’ but when he woke up he had the most marvellous idea. He simply put the whole sum down under ‘necessary expenditure’, and provoked a major international crisis to divert attention. In that way, Pericles escaped not only with his life but unimpeached, and was able to lead us through the first part of the war.
That story is typical of Alcibiades; first, that he should see that the way to deal with an insoluble problem is not to try and smash it open but to walk round it and leave it alone; second, that he should exercise his brilliance not for the good of the City but so that he could get his full quota of sleep; third, that he should be in bed with the leading man of the day. I confess that I have never liked Alcibiades, and the reason I dislike him is the reason everyone else adores him; because he’s the best-looking man in Athens. I tend to resent good-looking people. The Athenians, as I have said before, believe that the beautiful are good and that only the good are beautiful.
Alcibiades must have thanked the Gods that the only person prepared to make a real stand against him was Nicias son of Niceratus, because even his best friend (if he had one) could not pretend that Nicias was a thing of beauty, particularly when his kidneys were giving him trouble. I think Nicias started off as much in favour of the idea as everyone else; but then he saw a few inconsistencies in the project as outlined, and felt it his duty to point these out. Now everyone listened when Nicias spoke, even though it was generally agreed that he was the most boring and depressing speaker in Athens; I think they listened because they reckoned that something that tasted so horrible must be doing them good, like medicine. Whatever the reason, Nicias spoke and they listened, and Alcibiades started to worry. You know how the Athenians are, being a democracy; the more they love a man, the more they want to see him destroyed. Alcibiades had no wish to meet with the same treatment that they had handed out to Themistocles, Pericles and Cleon. He also knew about Nicias’ obsession with duty. If Nicias was somehow bounced into joining him as co-leader of the Sicilian project, with some nonentity as third partner so that Nicias would always be outvoted, that would put an end to all opposition; with Nicias on the team — thorough, meticulous, conscientious, screamingly dull old Nicias — even the most timid and cautious people could not help feeling absolutely safe.
So Nicias was appointed a second General; and he panicked. The only way he could think of to discourage the Athenians was to rely on his reputation and give them a grossly inflated estimate of the resources that the project would need if it were to be absolutely safe, in the hope of scaring the people off. So he prepared an enormous schedule, and read it out. The project would need scores of ships, he said, virtually every ship we had, and most of the male population of Athens would be needed, either as soldiers or sailors. And you couldn’t expect these heroes to go forth and conquer for the usual rates of pay; you’d have to give them a whole drachma a day, at least until the Sicilians started paying their share. Then there would be supplies and materiel; so many hundred thousand arrows and throwing-spears and sling-bolts, so many pairs of sandals and cloaks (thick, military) and cloaks (lightweight, military) and helmet-plumes and spear-covers and rowlock-pads and coils of rope and jars of sardines (fresh) and jars of sardines (dried); all of them at market price or above, because of the urgency, so there would have to be property taxes to raise the money. In short, he said, Athens would need to prepare the greatest army and navy ever assembled outside Persia; she would have to put forth almost her entire strength.
He finished his speech, in the confident expectation of silence broken only by discontented grumbling. What he got was a roar of approval and an almost unanimous vote in favour. I remember the expression on his face as if it were yesterday, like a man struck by lightning in the evening of a cool summer day. What he hadn’t reckoned with was the almost unnatural gregariousness of us Athenians; when something nice is happening, we don’t want to be left out, and for weeks people had been tortured by fears that they would be left behind. Now Nicias had said that there would be room for everybody. Everybody was going to go to Sicily!
Except me. I found out later that the person drawing up the enlistment roll was an unimportant little man who I had made some passing remark about in a Comedy. This had so enraged him — he wasn’t used to it, I suppose —that he decided out of spite to leave me off the roll.
I remember how furious I was when the roll was read out, and how I stumped back home, kicking a stone in front of me all the way. I was nasty to Phaedra, refused to eat any food, and went to bed while it was still light.
I lay in bed for hours, unable to get to sleep, and mused on the unfairness of life. About the only person I knew who wasn’t going was Aristophanes son of Philip, and the only reason he wasn’t going was because he was a coward and had bribed someone at the draft board. And now, I supposed, people would think that I had done the same. Only a few days before, I had been to see little Zeus, and he had been anxiously going over his property to see if he could manage to squeeze another cupful or so of produce out of it to bring him up to Heavy Infantry status, so that he could go to Sicily too — for if he went to Sicily, he said, he could probably make enough in pay and plunder to pay me back what he owed me. Knowing him, he had probably managed it, so he would be there. So would everybody in the world, except me and Aristophanes.
But Callicrates wasn’t going, said my soul. He was slightly too old for military service, and had refused to lie about his age, saying that a man who strove too hard to get mixed up in a war probably had something wrong with his brain. The more I thought about it, the more I was comforted, in a way, for most of the people I valued most were too old to fight. This set me worrying in a different direction (why did I only make friends with old people, and what would become of me when they died?), and between the two conflicting streams of anxiety I fell asleep.
I was woken up by the most appalling noise. Phaedra woke up too, and threw her arms around me out of pure terror, and as soon as I realised it was her and not the heavily armed Syracusan cavalryman I had been having a nightmare about, I felt rather brave and told her not to worry, I would protect her.
‘Marvellous,’ she said. ‘What from?’
‘Whatever made the noise,’ I said.
‘Idiot,’ she said, unwinding herself from me, ‘go back to sleep.’
There was another terrible crash, right outside our front door, and a lot of confused shouting. My first instinct was to hide under the bed, but that would have been the sort of behaviour one would expect from a man who wasn’t going to Sicily. Besides, I didn’t want to appear a coward in front of Phaedra, or life would be intolerable for the next week or two. So I pulled on a cloak, found my sword, and poked my head out of the front door.
The first thing I saw was my little statue of Hermes, with its head and phallus smashed off, lying on its side. I am not a brave man, but I had paid good money for that statue after its predecessor was wrecked, and I wanted a word with the person responsible. I looked up and down the street, but there wa
s no one in sight; just moonlight, a few stray dogs and a little pool of fresh vomit. Just like any other night in the violet-crowned City of the Muses.
A sensible man would have cursed freely and gone back to bed. Instead, I looped my cloak round my arm, gripped my sword firmly, and set off in pursuit. For I could hear smashing-noises just round the corner; the assassin had not got far. Walking quietly, on the sides of my feet, I crept round and saw a gang of very drunk-looking young men dismembering the statue outside the house of one Philopsephus, a grain merchant.
There were rather a lot of them, and some of them were quite big, and drunks can be terribly violent. I decided that Callicrates was right; only a fool would strive too hard to get mixed up in a battle. I started to retire, but unfortunately I had left it rather late for that. One of the jolly stone-masons had seen me, and was yelling to his friends.
How do drunk people manage to run so fast, I wonder? Before I could cover the few yards to my door they were on to me, and I brandished my sword at them as if I were Achilles himself. One of them made a rude noise and took it away from me, and another one grabbed my arms from behind.
‘I said no witnesses,’ said a voice behind me, slurring its words somewhat. ‘We’ll have to cut his throat, whoever he is.’
‘Good idea,’ said the man who had taken my sword. He was a tall man with a bald head, and I recognised his voice.
‘That would be typical, Aristophanes son of Philip,’ I said, ‘using a drunken brawl as an excuse to murder your chief rival.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ said Aristophanes, ‘it’s not you again, is it?’ He peered at me and made a sort of whining noise, like a dog after a titbit. ‘Gentlemen,’ he protested to his friends, ‘this is too much. Every time I have a little bit of fun in this city, this little creep pops up and gets under my feet. It’s getting beyond a joke, it really is. Please take him away and cut his head off.’
‘Who is he, then?’ asked the man behind me.
‘My name is Eupolis,’ I said, ‘and as a poet I am under the direct protection of the God Dionysus. Anyone who so much as nicks my skin will be condemned to drink nothing but water for the rest of his life.’
Someone giggled, and soon they were all roaring with laughter, the way drunks do — all except Aristophanes, who was begging them to kill me. It would be such fun, he pleaded; they could cut off my head and put it in a bag, and use it for turning people into stone.
‘And now,’ I said confidently, ‘if I may have my sword back, I will leave you to your work, which I can see is of considerable public importance.’
‘That’s right,’ someone said. ‘Got to stop the fleet sailing. Can’t have Alcithingides prancing round Sicily nibbling all the cheese off the cities. Going to burn the fleet soon as we’ve finished here.’
‘What a splendid idea,’ I said. ‘Then no one can go.’
I prised my sword out of the hand of the man holding it (I recognised him too; in fact I knew most of them now I could see them clearly — all people who weren’t going to Sicily, which probably explained why they had been having a party) and walked quickly away without looking round. The sound of breaking marble indicated that they had resumed their work. I shut the front door behind me, and put up the bar.
‘Well?’ Phaedra called out. ‘Who did you kill? You were gone a long time.’
‘They’d gone by the time I got there,’ I replied. ‘You were worried, weren’t you?’
‘No I wasn’t,’ said Phaedra. ‘Who cares a damn what happens to you?’
I tossed my sword into a corner. My little brush with danger had taken most of the sting out of not going to Sicily, and my own moderate cleverness in getting out of the danger had left me feeling rather cheerful.
‘Come here and say that,’ I said.
The next day, nobody was feeling very cheerful. You must understand how superstitious people were then, before Philosophy became so fashionable, and how everyone was terribly edgy because of the sailing of the fleet. So when they woke up and found that someone had been smashing up statues of the Gods (apparently the jolly stone-masons had made a clean sweep of most of the little Hermeses in the City), they were appalled and took it as an omen. Hermes, they said, was the God of Escorts He goes with us when our souls travel across the Styx, and watches over all embassies and perilous journeys —and now all His statues were only fit for the lime-kilns; the God was angry with us. I think the main reason for the panic was that nobody knew who had done it, because everyone (except me) had been asleep; either they were sailing the next day with the fleet and had had an early night, or they had been to good-luck parties and were sleeping it off. So it was anybody’s guess who was responsible, and under such circumstances, anybody tends to guess at hidden conspiracies. By dawn, the general view was that the anti-democratic faction, whoever they were, had done the deed in order to bring disaster on the fleet and then, by some undefined means, seize control of the State. It was all very worrying.
Put together three or four worried Athenians, and they will immediately demand that the General be impeached. The General at this time, of course, was Alcibiades; and thanks to the inscrutable processes of the democratic mind, it was assumed, without question, that since the expedition was Alcibiades’ idea and had been conceived and organised by him, he must have sabotaged it. After all, people said, Alcibiades is always going to parties and getting drunk, and people who get drunk smash up statues. Therefore it followed, as night follows day, that Alcibiades, single-handed or with accomplices, smashed up the statues.
Now I knew for a fact that he hadn’t, but even I am not so stupid as to open my mouth at such a time, and so I kept quiet. After all, I had no great love for the man, and given his career to date it was inevitable that he was going to be put to death sooner or later, so why not now? Besides, I am an Athenian and so must always find someone to blame for my misfortunes; and I think that deep inside my soul, I was blaming Alcibiades — if he hadn’t organised it, there would be no fleet for me not to sail with. It was the wrong thing to do, of course, but I was amply punished for it later.
So the Athenians were in a difficult position. Unless they impeached Alcibiades, they couldn’t execute him for blasphemy; but if they did that, there would be no Sicilian project and everybody would have to go back to work. There was a frenzied debate about it in the Assembly which amused me very much, with everybody calling everybody else a monarchist and accusing each other of betraying naval secrets to the Persians, and finally they reached an Athenian compromise. Alcibiades would lead the fleet to conquest and glory in Sicily, and they would try him for blasphemy on his return. This would give his enemies plenty of time to buy the requisite witnesses, and everybody would have two treats to look forward to instead of one.
Do I sound as if I hate my city and this monster we used to call democracy? I don’t. I suppose I felt for Athens in those days the same tortuous jumble of emotions as I felt for Phaedra; even when she behaved most terribly, she fascinated me utterly, and I would not have had a different city, or a different wife, for all the wealth of King Gyges. All my life I have loved the Festivals, where three Tragedies are followed by one Comedy, and the horror and the humour get mixed up in your mind until you can barely tell them apart. Now I am a worshipper of Comedy: I believe in it absolutely, as being the purpose of the world and of mankind, and I believe that Zeus thinks as I do, which is the only possible explanation I can think of for most things that happen, and so I winnow out the Comedy and let the wind blow everything else away. Now tell me, where else in all the kingdoms of the earth could Zeus and I find a richer Comedy than in Athens, where men used to conduct their affairs in the way I have described to you? And of all the little Comedies of Athens, what could be better than the Comedy of bad-faced Eupolis and his bad-faced wife?
Dexitheus the bookseller, who is a man of taste and discrimination, tells me that I should stop here. He thinks that this first part of my life makes a complete story in itself, dealing as it does
with Athens before its downfall. He feels that in what I have written so far I have so perfectly blended Tragedy and Comedy that to add any more would be a display of sacrilegious ingratitude towards the Muses who have so clearly inspired me up till now, and that the next part of my story, which deals with what actually happened when we got to Sicily, would therefore be best published under separate cover. Now I have known Dexitheus since before the holes in his ears healed up and everybody thought he was just another ex-slave on the make, and so I can honestly say that the fact that he can make two drachmas by selling two short books but only one and a half by selling one long one has not influenced his advice to me on this matter in any respect, and I am bound to say that on the whole I agree with him.
I shall therefore leave you at this point and catch up on my sleep, which I have been neglecting lately. If you want to find out what happened in the end, and what became of the greatest expedition ever mounted and the most perfect democracy the world has ever seen, I recommend that you buy at least three copies of this book, and advise all your friends and relatives to do the same; that way, Dexitheus may feel justified in asking me (and the Muses, of course) to exert ourselves just one more time.
One last thing. I was talking to a man of my age yesterday night, and he assured me that the fighting-cock killed by Ajax Bloodfoot wasn’t called Euryalus the Foesmiter at all. He is positive that I’ve confused the bird I saw (which, according to him, was called The Mighty Hercules) with the bird that eventually did for Ajax Bloodfoot about three months later. He may well be right, at that; so, since this is meant to be a work of history, I record his opinion on the matter as well as my own and leave the final choice to generations yet unborn.
PART TWO