Unfortunately for some quarter million residents of the Athenian state, there was a young twenty-six-year-old aristocrat present among the small contingent of Athenian horsemen at Delium. Worse still, for his generation, he fought extremely well at this, his first and most savage pitched infantry battle. Alcibiades not only survived the harrowing retreat in the fighting’s aftermath, but he established a reputation for bravery as an Athenian cavalryman who protected the philosopher Socrates and other desperate infantrymen as they sought salvation from a host of marauding pursuers. The acclaim and spiritual capital won at Delium thrust the young firebrand—purportedly the most handsome man in wartime Athens, if not the most outrageous with his exaggerated lisp and fancy clothes—into the forefront of Athenian politics for a generation to come, with unfortunate results for thousands of Athenians not yet born.
Alcibiades was orphaned at the age of three. His father, the aristocrat Cleinias, had been killed at the battle of Coronea (447 B.C.)—an earlier Athenian failure to annex Boeotia some twenty-three years prior to, and not far from, Delium. With his younger brother, the junior Cleinias, Alcibiades grew up under the guardianship of the famous Athenian statesman Pericles and his brother Ariphron. Soon he also came under the tutelage of the middle-aged philosopher Socrates. Scurrilous ancient tales abound about his reckless youth—extended runaways to join older male lovers, charges of incestuous relationships with his mother and sister (an impossible story, not because Alcibiades was incapable of such outrage, but because he seems not to have had a sister), illegitimate children, and gratuitous brawling. Indeed, Socrates—to his later detriment—was blamed for the notorious career of Alcibiades, despite the admission of the latter that he had spent his youth fleeing from the moral strictures of his mentor.
Alcibiades probably saw his first military service a few years before Delium at eighteen, during an Athenian expedition to the northern Greek city of Potidaea on the eve of the Peloponnesian War. The Athenians conducted a brutal two-year siege of the port, causing widespread starvation and outbreaks of cannibalism among the entrapped townsfolk. During the ordeal, Alcibiades was caught isolated and wounded. He survived only due to his companionship with Socrates, who stayed by his side, preserving both his life and armor. In Plato’s Symposium, the obstreperous Alcibiades in a mood of drunken candor blurts out that although he was later given a citation for valor at Potidaea, it was really Socrates who deserved the award.
In a military context, Alcibiades next appears at Delium, eight years after Potidaea. There, as a cavalryman, he attempted to fight a rearguard action against Boeotian and Locrian patrols. Immediate reports of the young Alcibiades’ stalwart action served as a catalyst to his budding political career. Within months of the battle the pampered aristocrat had nevertheless positioned himself as a radical opponent to the traditional conservative leader Nicias and his colleague Laches—another veteran of Delium—who were attempting to find a peaceful solution to the war. Despite Alcibiades’ vehement opposition, the two older establishment figures would soon engineer a truce with Sparta in 421 B.C., resulting in the so-called Peace of Nicias. The murderously internecine Peloponnesian War looked like it was at last over.
But by 420 B.C., a mere four years after Delium and a year after hostilities had ceased, Alcibiades had schemed to enact a treaty with democratic Argos, Sparta’s chief antagonist in the Peloponnese. He then convinced the Athenians to threaten the general peace with Sparta: with his new mandate and popularity, Alcibiades succeeded in barring Sparta from the Olympic Games of 420, established points of resistance throughout the Peloponnese, and finally created a coalition of Peloponnesian states to fight Sparta at the climactic battle of Mantinea (418)—a brutal slugfest that saw the Spartans instead triumph over Athens’s newfound allies.
No Athenian had done more to ensure that the Peloponnesian War would continue than Alcibiades, who undermined the Peace of Nicias and made Sparta stronger in the process. More astounding was his ability to galvanize popular support against Athenian conservatives. Given his own aristocratic birth, privileged upbringing, and elite tastes in clothes, horses, and entertainment, in some ways Alcibiades made an unlikely demagogue.
Once the peace ended for good, Athens returned to its traditional policy of multifaceted campaigns of aggression throughout the Aegean. Most notorious was the siege of the neutral island of Melos in 416 B.C. Once the city fell, the Athenians enslaved the women and children and executed the entire adult male population. The famous “Melian Dialogue” ending the fifth book of Thucydides’ history provides a chilling account of arrogant Athenian envoys dismissing the Melian entreaties for neutrality. Power, not justice, the Athenian invaders lecture, is always the final arbiter of state relations; self-interest, not morality, is what guides and must guide the behavior of states. Appeals to mercy or hope for reprieve are misguided, not rooted in either logic or a realistic understanding of human behavior. The Melians must either capitulate or be destroyed, inasmuch as they are the weaker power, the Athenians the imperial hegemon. We are not sure of Alcibiades’ precise role in the executions that followed the Melians’ capitulation, but the biographer Plutarch relates that he had a large hand in the barbaric sentencing of the island’s captured citizenry. Popular myth further related that he fathered a child by one of the enslaved women of the island.
In contrast, there is no doubt about Alcibiades’ large responsibility for the disastrous Athenian expedition to Sicily that sailed from Athens a few months after the slaughter on Melos. Thucydides recounted in detail the great debate in the Athenian Assembly over the undertaking, highlighting Alcibiades’ rhetorical success in convincing the citizenry to send a vast armada to Sicily 800 miles distant—even as an undefeated Sparta and Boeotia threatened the very Athenian hinterland. Worse yet, on the eve of the fleet’s sailing, herms throughout the city—sacred phallic fertility statues to the god Hermes placed in front of Athenian temples and private homes—were found mutilated. Rumors spread about the outrage: the defacement meant either that omens were now unfavorable to the embarkation or, more cynically, that radical subversives were trying to undermine the democracy itself. Added to that sacrilege, additional stories circulated that the sacred rites of the Eleusinian mysteries had been profaned by mock celebrations in private homes—the equivalent of prominent American politicians caught lampooning the Last Supper or comically reenacting in drag the Crucifixion. In both instances of profanation, Alcibiades was alleged to have been a prominent ringleader. Although he had long departed with the fleet to Sicily when the formal inquiry concluded, Alcibiades’ enemies quickly made plans for his recall, trial on charges of sacrilege, and hoped-for execution.
The comic poet Aristophanes once remarked of Alcibiades that “it is not wise to raise up a lion within the state—but once someone has reared him, one better pay attention to his moods.” The voters of Athens failed miserably on both those counts. After entrusting the monumental campaign against Sicily to Alcibiades’ singular genius—he officially held command with his cogenerals Nicias and Lamachus—the Athenians now ordered his recall just as they were beginning to move against Sicily’s pro-Spartan capital of Syracuse. After turning their lion loose on their enemies, the Athenians abruptly sought to cage him as he neared his prey. When state officials arrived at Sicily for his arrest on charges of profanation, Alcibiades escaped to Italy and shortly thereafter made his way over to the Peloponnese. There he provided the Spartan command with information about the entire Athenian theater of operations as well as more astute advice on how to wear down his own native city. The next two years resulted in the destruction of both the initial Athenian army in Sicily and an equally large relief force, resulting in a total of nearly forty thousand Athenians and their allies who never returned home. Athens was now nearly without sailors or ships.
By 413 B.C. the entire Sicilian expeditionary force was lost and the catastrophe rightly perceived as largely a direct result of Alcibiades’ prescient advice to Sparta to send help to Sic
ily without delay. Nothing is more dramatic than Thucydides’ account of the failure of the Athenian siege: a Spartan armada under the General Gylippus arrives in the nick of time at the Great Harbor at Syracuse to save the Sicilian capital from the besiegers. But the damage to his native country was not yet completed. During his two-year sojourn in Sparta (415–13 B.C.), Alcibiades not only advised the Spartan counterattack on Sicily but also helped devise the permanent occupation and fortification of Decelea—an outpost inside Attica not more than fifteen miles from the walls of Athens itself!
The result was that while Athens was bleeding in Sicily and losing most of her fleet and last reserves, a Spartan garrison was organizing systematic attacks on the Athenian countryside with relative impunity, driving away stock and slaves, attacking farms, and keeping many Athenians inside the city proper. Still not satisfied and ever eager to cement his position in the volatile world of Spartan high politics, Alcibiades now traveled to western Asia Minor in an effort to encourage the eastern Aegean subjects of the maritime Athenian empire to revolt, through a combination of Spartan political support and Persian money.
If earlier the chameleon Alcibiades had reinvented himself as a dour Spartan—no doubt discarding the customary lavish clothes, coifed hair, and ostentatious lisp—now in the court of the Persian satrap of western Asia Minor, Tissaphernes, Alcibiades had the easier task of playing the role of the pampered and effete Eastern court noble. Just as the Spartans had welcomed their Athenian convert to the brutal Laconian military life, so now Tissaphernes lavished praise on his newfound naturalized Persian grandee. Plutarch remarks of his protean persona:
In Sparta he adopted gymnastic training, the simple life, and a dour disposition; in Ionia he pursued luxury and pleasure; at Thrace he was a great drinker; in Thessaly he was absorbed with horses; and at the court of Tissaphernes, the Persian satrap, his own pomp and profligacy outdid even Persian extravagance.
Yet a mere three years after his escape from an Athenian capital sentence, Alcibiades was close to being put to death again, this time by his new benefactors as well—allegations of seducing and impregnating a Spartan king’s wife did his cause no good. Facing both Athenian and Spartan death sentences, Alcibiades for at least two years (413–11 B.C.) continued his brilliant intrigue with the Persian lord Tissaphernes. Why not play Sparta off against Athens, Alcibiades argued to the Persian court, giving money to both sides to ensure that the Peloponnesian War continued in stalemate? Three decades of war could only help Persia in its larger aim of wrecking Greece.
Eventually the Persians also grew tired of Alcibiades’ conniving. The only avenue of escape was a recall back to Athens. Political upheaval in 411 B.C. gave Alcibiades another opening. Athenian rightists had staged a coup and for a few months managed to instill an oligarchy in efforts to seek some end to the political infighting and redress the disastrous conduct of the war—perhaps with a rapprochement to Sparta. Although those rightists were his old political enemies, Alcibiades now embarked on a brilliant policy of triangulation to find his way back to Athens.
To the Persians, he argued the wisdom of supporting Athens: only that way could the growing power of Sparta be stemmed. A friendly Athenian navy would leave the coast of Asia Minor alone; two balanced adversaries would damage each other in ways Persia could not. To the Athenian oligarchs who were tenuously holding power, Alcibiades reminded them that—with the proper intermediary—Persia was likely to look favorably on their more narrow government; he also offered implicit support for their efforts at checking the mob; the volatile Assembly, after all, had demanded his own death sentence four years earlier. And finally, to the democratic resistance he offered inspired military leadership and a renewed crusade to lead a reconstituted fleet against the Spartans. All the while he stayed away from Athens, constantly monitoring the ebb and flow of the relative balance of power between Persians, Spartans, Athenian oligarchs, and democrats as he intrigued with Athenian seamen on the nearby island of Samos and avoided making explicit shows of support for any side.
The strategy worked brilliantly—and solely for his own narrow personal interests. Within a few months the oligarchy collapsed and Alcibiades was recalled (although he dared not yet visit Athens). As a stalwart of the reenergized democracy, he led the Athenian fleet in a sustained and largely successful naval campaign in the Hellespont—a theater conflict that resulted in the short-term resurgence of Athenian maritime supremacy and the near destruction of the Spartan fleet. At last by 407 B.C., Alcibiades sailed into the Piraeus and was greeted by popular acclaim and the return of his confiscated property. Enemy of domestic reactionaries, foe to the hated Spartans, and guardian of Hellenic freedom from the threats of Persia, the reinvented Alcibiades now rallied the democracy to renew the war effort. He was only forty-three and at the pinnacle of Athenian politics—all thanks to his brilliant start at Delium seventeen years earlier.
But given the volatility of the Assembly, the mercurial character of Alcibiades, and years’ worth of accumulated enemies, his renewed ascendance was but the calm before the storm. After an Athenian naval defeat at Notium (406 B.C.), Alcibiades’ naval campaign faltered and he was relieved of command. Surmising that dismissal, as in the past, would lead to indictment, and indictment to a sentence of death, he fled to one of his safe estates in Thrace. There he did his best in reduced circumstances to plot yet another return to Athens while he intrigued with the local Persian satrap, Pharnabazus. But with the defeat of Athens in 404 B.C., Alcibiades had played his last card.
A second and far more violent right-wing cabal now overthrew Athenian democracy in April 404 B.C. Its leaders quickly made it known that they would tolerate no return of the perennial Athenian firebrand Alcibiades and so agitated for his death. There were receptive ears abroad. The architect of the Spartan victory and protector of the Athenian revolutionaries, the admiral Lysander, welcomed the opportunity to settle Sparta’s own grievances against the traitor Alcibiades. Meanwhile, dynastic succession threatened the Persian Empire as the satraps Pharnabazus and Tissaphernes watched carefully the growing rivalry between Artaxerxes and his usurper brother Cyrus for the Achaemenid throne—an increasingly dangerous landscape for the old intriguer and outsider Alcibiades, now ensconced on Persian-occupied soil. With enemies like these, Alcibiades was hunted down in Phrygia and executed at the age of forty-five, his political ambitions in ruins—along with the Athenian empire he had sought both to expand and destroy.
Despite Alcibiades’ undeniable military acumen, political skills, and the perfidy of his enemies, his political record was one of abject catastrophe for Athens. His legacy was far more than the cynical manipulation of the Assembly, his self-serving embrace of allies and foes, and his criminal indifference to the role of Athenian religious symbolism and traditional values. He was also responsible for fundamental damage to Greece as a whole that went well beyond the loss of Athens’s empire. Alcibiades’ efforts at conspiracy in the Peloponnese—when they failed—helped undermine the Peace of Nicias and ensured that a remission from the killing and a brokered peace would evolve into another decade and a half of even more brutal internecine Hellenic war. In the increasing savagery of that conflict, a democratic Athens butchered innocents as did no other Greek oligarchy—and Alcibiades seems to have been the proponent of just such an ironhanded policy, as the murder of the Melians perhaps attests. He was architect of the Sicilian expedition, a harebrained Athenian scheme to conquer Syracuse, the largest democracy in Greece, that nevertheless might have worked had its instigator not betrayed its plans and galvanized Spartan intervention. The cost of tolerating an Alcibiades was the destruction of Athenian naval resources, the revolt of imperial allies, and the annihilation of a generation of Athenians.
The creation of the Spartan fleet with its critical subsidies of Persian money was in part a result of Alcibiades’ conniving between 415 and 411 B.C. The ruination of the promise of classical Greece at the end of the fifth century was not Alcibiades’ legacy alone,
but no other Greek did so much to kill other Greeks and promote war for war’s sake, unconcerned with morality, ideology, or nationality. Pericles, Cleon, Brasidas, Lysander, and most other prominent proponents for war in both Athens and Sparta were at least nationalists—if not believers in the respective causes of radical democracy or narrow oligarchy. Alcibiades embraced no belief other than himself.
Had Alcibiades died at Delium, the Peace of Nicias might have survived—or at least the Athenians would not have entered upon the disastrous policy of provoking the Spartans without sending commensurate forces abroad to back up their brinkmanship. The destructive last two decades of the Peloponnesian War might have been averted. Had other firebrands subverted the truce, and war renewed, Athens nevertheless probably would not have gone to Sicily. From Thucydides’ account of the debate over the expedition, Alcibiades’ brilliant rhetoric almost single-handedly sways the volatile Assembly to reject the prudent advice of Nicias to stay home. In consequence, thousands of Sicilians, Melians, and Athenians might well have lived had Alcibiades perished at twenty-six rather than at forty-five years of age.
Tragically, he not only survived Delium, but thrived precisely because of the unique circumstances of that disastrous day in Athenian history. It was not merely his bravery in the retreat, but the peculiar nature of the battle itself that served as his catalyst. In a society where tradition and family meant everything, the sight of the mounted twenty-six-year-old orphan fighting inveterate enemies who had killed his father on the same soil of Boeotia stirred his compatriots. More important still, Alcibiades fought not in isolation, but alongside an entire cadre of luminaries of Athenian society, many of whom, unlike the young upstart, either ran or perished at Delium. Alcibiades’ brave day at Delium in sight of Socrates and his friends would prove to be a time bomb for Athens.
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