The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [159]
He appeared to be setting sail for home. His ship was docked in Thurii (a new-town colony of Athens, founded 446–443 BC and settled by a number of Greek luminaries, the historian Herodotus amongst them). And then Alcibiades vanished. Thurii, like many settlements at this time, nurtured anti- as well as pro-Athenian elements and clearly someone there had been persuaded, or had been paid sufficiently handsomely, to cover his tracks. Alcibiades was next heard of in the bosom of Athens’ arch-enemy, first in Elis and then in the wall-less city-state of none other than Sparta.
The Athenians were wild with rage – and we have found hard evidence of their anger. Reused in the Agora as rough building material there is a stone block about 3 feet high,6 and on it is etched Alcibiades’ shame. This block denounces the aristocrat as an enemy of the democracy; it was displayed, haughtily, up on the Acropolis. Alcibiades’ property and that of his immediate clique was confiscated. His estates, even twenty-two of his gowns, were auctioned off. His name was cursed by priests in sanctuaries and in public arenas such as the Agora. Any Athenian who thought of making contact with him would become eternally polluted.7 He was condemned to death. It would appear that Alcibiades had burned every one of his bridges.
Socrates’ influence had, apparently, rubbed off on his protégé, although hardly with results that the philosopher would condone. Why do the obvious? Why blindly follow an orthodox path? If the action you are taking feels good, then why not turn convention on its head and pursue your course? Socrates had taught the young in the Agora, and soldiers, and dinner-mates, that men need to think for themselves. Well, no one could accuse Alcibiades of conformity. He was individual to his core.
Now the Athenians needed to be very worried. They had a bitter, well-informed, charismatic traitor in the heart of their enemy’s camp. By doubting Alcibiades they had lost the one man who was guaranteed to fire up democratic soldiers to fight a pitiless battle in a foreign land. Careless!
Alcibiades wasted no time. He swaggered with his new-found rebel-power – he managed to intimidate both his countrymen and the Spartans at the same time. The smart aristocrat warned Sparta that Athens’ ambitions to take over the Peloponnese were unlimited. Their women would be impregnated by Athenian cock, their boy warriors forced to march to war under an Athenian yoke. Go to Sicily, he said, my hoplites are all over the place, they haven’t packed half enough forces; send out your diplomats, your proxenoi – tell the rest of the Aegean that ballsy, busybody Athens is stumbling; and get yourself into a crow’s-nest position above the city-state itself: go just north of Athens, to the Attic town of Decelea.
Back in Athens, panic joined gossip in the lanes and courtyards, in the Agora and Assembly. Religious paranoia escalated. The herms had been defiled, the sacred mysteries mocked. The flower of the city, the Athenian youth, was abroad – tempted out by a man who (or so the tongues wagged) despised Athena and her democrats. A man who had endeavoured to pollute the city from within, but had fled to Laconian lands (so he was not mired by the dirt that he had scattered through Athenian streets and sanctuaries). Informers set to work. The early toleration of the democratic state was forgotten. Citizens were tortured and executed. Fundamentalists clamoured that religious radicals should be put to death without trial. The priests of the mysteries of Eleusis helped coordinate the