The Last of the Wine
Page 41
421 The Peace of Nikias.
420 Olympic Games held. Lavish displays by Alkibiades who enters seven chariots and wins 1st, 2nd and 4th prizes.
419 Alliance with Argos engineered by Alkibiades.
418 Athens re-enters the war.
416 Melos reduced and captured by Athenians after Siege. Adult males massacred and non-combatants enslaved, Phaedo probably among them.
Agathon awarded the prize for Tragedy; the occasion of the party described in Plato's Symposium.
415 First performance of Euripides' Trojan Women.
Preparations for Sicilian Expedition.
Breaking of the Hermes and accusation of Alkibiades.
Expedition sets out in early summer.
Alkibiades recalled for trial but escapes to Sparta.
Aristophanes' Birds performed.
413 Dekeleia seized and fortified by the Spartans on advice of Alkibiades.
Mykalessos in Boeotia seized by Thracians under Athenian command, with barbarous massacre of non-combatants, including children in school.
Timaea, wife of King Agis, seduced by Alkibiades.
Reinforcements sent to Sicily under Demosthenes, whose night attack is repulsed with heavy loss. Nikias agrees to leave but is delayed by eclipse of the moon (August 27th).
Naval action in harbour and total defeat of Athenian fleet.
Retreat of Athenian army followed by debacle.
412 Alkibiades campaigning in Ionian Islands. Widespread revolt of Athenian subject Allies. Sparta recognises Persian claim to Ionia, in return for funds to finance her fleet.
Isthmian Games held and Athenians invited.
Alkibiades goes to Persians; is entertained by Tissaphernes.
411 Subversion of democracy in Athens. Promise of electoral roll of 4,000 not implemented; political assassinations and reign of terror.
Revolution in Samos crushed with help of Alkibiades, who has discarded the oligarchs (according to Thucydides, because he had promised them more than the Persians would give).
Counter-revolution in Athens by moderate conservatives under Theramenes, in time to prevent capitulation to Sparta. The Four Hundred oligarchs overthrown; leaders in exile.
Euboea captured by Spartans with crippling loss of food-producing land and private estates.
The restored democracy recalls Alkibiades, who elects to remain in Samos in command of the fleet.
Aristophanes' Lysistrata and Thesmophorians performed.
410 Alkibiades victorious in the Aegean,
Euripides' Electra performed.
409 Agathon, and possibly Euripides, leave Athens for Macedon.
408 Alkibiades recovers Byzantium and returns in triumph to Athens.
407 Lysander in command of Spartan fleet.
406 Antiochos defeated by Lysander in battle of Notium (Cape Rain). Alkibiades deposed.
Battle of Arginusae (the White Isles). Desertion of wrecks causes heavy loss of life. Unconstitutional trial of the Generals; protest by Sokrates.
Offer of peace by Spartans. The demagogue Kleophon moves rejection.
405 Lysander, re-appointed to command at Cyrus' request, blockades Lampsakos.
Athenian fleet annihilated at Aegospotami (Goat's Creek).
General revolt of subject allies (except Samos). Siege of Athens begun.
404 Siege of Athens. Theramenes negotiates in Salamis. Starvation compels surrender (April).
Thirty Tyrants established in Athens by Lysander. Reign of terror. Alkibiades assassinated in Phrygia.
Autolykos murdered.
Theramenes procures nomination of 3,000 citizens entitled to civil rights.
403 Kritias denounces Theramenes.
Thrasybulos and the Seventy seize Phyle. Judicial
murder of Eleusinians. Capture of Piraeus and Battle of Munychia. Kritias
killed.
King Pausanias of Sparta intervenes. Proclaims amnesty and withdraws garrison.
402 Lysander deposed.
401 Cyrus killed in war of succession against Artaxerxes. His mercenary army of Ten Thousand Greeks left leaderless, their generals, including Proxenos the friend of Xenophon, being treacherously killed by Tissaphernes. Xenophon rallies the despairing troops and with assistance of other junior officers marches them from Babylon to the Hellespont across wild and hostile country.
400 Death of King Agis. His son barred from the succession on suspicion of Alkibiades' paternity.
399 Xenophon in exile.
Sokrates indicted, tried, and executed after thirty days in prison, awaiting the return of the sacred galley from Delos. Plato and other friends, after remaining with him to the last, withdraw to Megara.
mary renault was born in London, where her father was a doctor. She first went to Oxford with the idea of teaching, but decided that she wanted to be a writer instead, and that after taking her degree she should broaden her knowledge of human life. She then trained for three years as a nurse, and wrote her first published novel, Promise of Love. Her next three novels were written during off-duty time when serving in the war. One of them, Return to Night, received the M.G.M. award. After the war, she went to South Africa and settled at the Cape. She has traveled considerably in Africa and has gone up the east coast to Zanzibar and Mombasa. But it was her trip to Greece, her visits to Corinth, Samos, Crete, Delos, Aegina, and other islands as well as to Athens, Sounion, and Marathon that resulted in her brilliant historical reconstructions of ancient Greece, The Last of the Wine, The King Must Die, The Bull from the Sea, The Mask of Apollo, Fire from Heaven, and The Persian Boy.
A superb historical novel.
— (London) Times Literary Supplement
Not since Robert Graves' I, Claudius
has there been such an exciting,
living image of the ancient world on
this grand scale. It is a glowing
work of art. —The New York Times Book Review
An extraordinary piece of
imaginative reconstruction.
—Book-of-the-Month Club News
Alexias, a young Athenian of good
family, reaches manhood during the
last phases of the Peloponnesian War,
a time not unlike our own, when people born to a heritage of security
and power felt the structure of their lives being undermined by forces
that they but dimly understood.
He meets Lysis, another youth who has
come under the influence of Socrates,
and their relationship develops
against a background of expeditions,
athletic games, famine, siege
and civil war.