The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [158]
Muffled by cloth, metal had eaten into these smooth, cool, strong, stone men. With such a disturbance the dogs of the city must have set one another barking. But perhaps the human shadows that glided from place to place seemed just too intimidating to interrupt, because the peculiar mutilations were not stopped, no one was arrested. The strange, hideous sacrilege was allowed to continue unabated. On the ground now were shards of marble, chips of paint, splinters of desecration. Many of the herms of the city had had their noses – and, in some cases, their penises – smashed off.
Not even the most wily soothsayer or a Pythia priestess could interpret this as a good omen. Sculptures whose spirits ensured a fair journey were now weak, broken shadows of themselves. The jaws of the departing soldiers who knew of the scandal took a rather grim set.
But then things picked up. The sailing was smooth. Allied fleets that had already assembled in Corcyra made the crossing without mishap. Nicias, the senior officer in charge of the Athenian fleet, although in ill health before he left, seemed to be coping well. There was no massed force waiting to bludgeon the allied Athenian troops (all 25,000 of them) to death. The Spartan allies of the Sicilians were conspicuous by their absence. The landings went smoothly, the pastures and foliage, particularly lush on this side of the island, were meadow-sweet. And maybe sick of slaughter, maybe sensing the need not to repeat another Melos, the Athenians did two very odd things. They treated the campaign a little like a scouting mission, property developers making their way up the coast.
And they did not attack: this, it seemed, was going to be a well-mannered invasion. They had the best men with them and a fair wind behind. Instead of punishing the local populations, they started to fan out along Sicily’s eastern seaboard. There was no complacency, this was of course a tricky operation, but still … The Athenian hoplites and their aristocratic leaders seemed to have at last recaptured some of that heroic vigour that immortalises them still in the Parthenon Marbles and around the sides of masterfully painted pots.
Then pheme, gossip, fouled the air with her bad breath. As the ships had been ploughing their way west, tongues had started to wag back in the mother-city. Someone had heard something at one of those infamous symposia that made for juicy gossip. Golden-haired Alcibiades, that provoking, beautiful, privileged boy, that adorant of the eccentric old Socrates, that lisping lover of oligarchs and Spartans, had mocked the gods. And not just a roadside-shrine god, but the goddess Demeter herself, the female whose sacred, mysterious rites at Eleusis promised you both an afterlife and acceptance into the ‘haves’ of Athenian society. They gossiped that he had held his own version of the Eleusinian Mysteries within the privacy of his own home, and even worse, it was muttered, it was none other than Alcibiades and his motley over-privileged crew which had rampaged through the city the night before the fleet set sail and destroyed the herms – the very totems of Athenian security abroad.
What a cocksure fool, they started to say, what an oily, blasphemous, dangerous streak of lightning. We’ll recall him, we’ll charge him, we – the emasculates who are left in the city along with women, children, the sick, the other grey-hairs – we’ll show that we still have fire in our bellies.
And so the message was sent that Alcibiades must return to face trial.
Alcibiades heard the news and replied with the most spectacular two-finger salute. Why on earth should he slink back to the city, charged with a capital crime: sacrilege and treason? Thucydides tells us that after Sicily the General had been planning to take Carthage too – and from