The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [164]
With the Thebans at their backs and an impoverished Athens ahead of them, it looked as though Sparta’s favourite hero, Herakles, had broken the back of his thirteenth labour – that soon Athena’s city would be his.
46
TIME OF TERROR
Athens, 412–406 BC
Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There is never a democracy that did not commit suicide.
John Adams, letter, 15 April 1814
AND WHAT OF ALCIBIADES? WOULD THIS not be the time for him to wield his killer-blow against the city that had so publicly disowned him?
Yet, like all jilted lovers, the ‘adored tyrant of Athens’1 would not cut loose, not be rejected so easily.
Always a little ‘weak about the trousers’, Alcibiades was said to have been busy during his time in Sparta, particularly in the balmy district where the two Spartan kings lived. Magoula, as it was known then and still is today, feels privileged. In amongst the banana and orange groves are the homes of rich men. The tributaries of the Eurotas River, high-reeded, gurgle through the fields, and jasmine spills over well-built walls. The remains of Roman baths, abandoned in olive groves, remind one that this was once a place of relaxation and sensual pleasure. And it was here that Alcibiades seduced the Spartan wife of King Agis while the cuckold was away on campaign.2 The love-match had spawned a child – and court gossips recalled that years later this wife, Timaea, still whispered into the ear of her golden-haired babe, ‘Alcibiades, Alcibiades.’ Agis, furious, had ordered Alcibiades’ execution – but of course the lustful Athenian had no intention of accepting termination, all because of a few moments of heterosexual pleasure. And so, bribing and dodging his way out of a Spartan death-penalty, he was on the road again – travelling back, not to Athens, but to where he smelled the money: to the east, to Persia.
His timing was good. Two generations after their defeats at Salamis and Plataea, the grandchildren of those shamed Persian kings were growing in confidence once more. The Persian emperor and his familiars supervised a long game of inter-state chess – manipulating the pieces so that now it was Athens, now the Spartans, who had the upper hand. Soon, they reasoned, these two, already weakened after twenty years of conflict, would pick away at one another’s defences so successfully that the Persians would be able to stride across their lands, and the lands of their allies, without so much as a sword being raised. Sparta and Athens had become two old cats in a bag, whose only option was to scratch one another to death.
And so it should come as little surprise to hear that by 412 BC we find Alcibiades in Asia Minor, acting as a double-agent-cum-advisor for the Persian Viceroy Tissaphernes.
For three years Alcibiades hedonised in Sardis – ‘medising’, soaking up the opulence of the Persian court and the ways of the ‘Medes’. His massive charisma was appreciated. ‘Even those who feared and envied him could not help delighting in his company.’3 He became Tissaphernes’ closest friend; Persian pleasure gardens were named after him. But Alcibiades was restless in the East. He had abandoned the black-broth – the pigs’-blood-based national dish – in Sparta, and you sense he was itching to return to his home-town Athens, although strictly on his terms. He had friends and relatives and men who owed him one in the city, and the runaway made it clear to them that he was still a player in the Athenian game. Making use of the network of spies and messengers that stitched together the eastern Mediterranean and the Near East, Alcibiades got word out to Athens. Promising the allegiance and support of the Persians, he started his own whispering campaign. Tough times call for tough measures, he said. The Spartan wolf is at our gates. We need finance and leadership and control, if we are to win. He offered to broker a deal –