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bringing good news back into the Agora. In one sense this was all a great confidence trick. Alcibiades appeared to have the ear of the Persians, and so the Athenian people rolled over to his side. Flurries of triremes on the white-flecked Aegean – Spartan, Athenian, Persian – had been thrashing it out for control of sea and land. Alcibiades had lived in and around Asia Minor and his local knowledge helped to effect a string of victories. With his triumph at the Battle of Kyzikos in 410, Alcibiades grappled back some self-respect for Athena’s city. By setting up a kind of customs house at Byzantium, charging 10 per cent to all trading traffic that sailed through the Hellespont, he also brought some hard cash back to the city-state.9 The demos, loyal to Alcibiades, who flattered and charmed them with deeds and coin, began to drift back to the Assembly. By 410/9 the old-style democracy had been restored, proving how remarkably resilient this word-idea in fact was – and how vindictive. The horsemen of the Four Hundred were not smiling now. There were reprisals the length and breadth of the city.

CHORUS: And if things don’t go well, if these good men

All fail, and Athens comes to grief, why then

Discerning folk will murmur (let us hope):

‘She’s hanged herself – but what a splendid rope’.10

When Socrates was young, the smell of destroyed carcasses in Athens came from the meat markets in the Agora, the tripe stalls on Piraeus harbour front or the dead animals prepared for tanning; now it was human flesh, first of democrats and then of oligarchs, that was making the air above Athena’s city rank.

Aristophanes’ Frogs, written when the city was a daily host to such barbarity, again captures the mood of the moment – where salvation no longer seems to lie in the future, but somewhere in a romanticised past:

But remember these men also, your own kinsmen, sire and son,

Who have of times fought beside you, spilt their blood on many seas;

Grant for that one fault the pardon which they crave you on their knees.

You whom nature made for wisdom, let your vengeance fall to sleep;

Greet as kinsmen and Athenians, burghers true to win and keep,

Whosoe’er will brave the storms and fight for Athens at your side!11

Athenian society’s underlying belief in the power of the ‘old’ way of doing things bubbled to the surface at a time of crisis. The reformed democracy of 410 set to inscribing the resumed democratic laws in stone. But what was being set down there was not a brave new world. The hard evidence, a surviving a carved stone stele, demonstrates that the public statements in Athens now have, literally, a more draconian feel. ‘The Athenians shall be governed in the ancestral ways, using the laws, weights and measures of Solon and also the regulations of Draco which had previously been in force.’12 It was to a conventional past that a traumatised people turned to find strength.

Alcibiades, the prodigal son

With the democracy restored and a number of oligarchic troublemakers executed, for a short time, in domestic affairs at least, Athens seemed to be temporarily robust. In 407, as a conquering hero once again, opportunist Alcibiades was recalled to Athens. Greeted at Piraeus with all the pomp and affection befitting one who had that vital Greek virtue kleos – fame, the worth to be sung of as the heroes of old – he went straight to the Pnyx to flex his well-exercised rhetorical muscles. At this moment Alcibiades was truly the prodigal son returned. The stele incarnating his disgrace was up-ended, dragged down from the Acropolis and thrown into the sea. In his play the Frogs, Aristophanes says the Athenians ‘pine for him, they hate him, but they wish to have him back’.13

Alcibiades led the procession heading towards the Eleusinian Mysteries – by necessity rerouted for a number of years to skirt those areas of Attic land under Spartan occupation – cocking a snook at the Spartan garrison at Decelea. The returning hero was followed by a gaggle of eager, sycophantic (‘sycophant’ in the modern, not Attic Greek, sense) citizens,