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By Root 1660 0

Athens to the wider world and within its walls. Much like the financiers in the first decade of the twenty-first century, these specialists traded in clever, invisible assets that seemed powerful, but that none outside their circle fully understood. There was a time when the delight of good argument, the cosy glow of inspiring words, had seemed to protect Athens: to give Athenians a great sense of themselves, to publicise their undeniable cleverness and self-confidence throughout the Eastern Mediterranean, to make anything seem possible. In the new inclusive political system, ordinary men needed their fancy words to survive the bear-pit of the law-courts, the fracas of the Assembly. The influx of foreigners, of foreign ideas, was, briefly, intensely exciting for Athens. Some sophists managed to grow fat on the democrats’ willingness and need to pay for words. At the outset of the democracy great orators had been adulated and the city-state had fallen in love with the art of rhetoric. But now men realised that the slickest speakers were running rings around them: if you could argue black was white, then it was only the most persuasive argument – not the most sound, the most logical, the best – that would win the day. Democrats realised that men could be tricked into doing dreadful, as well as noble, things. Smooth talk was recognised as spin, and it lost its charm.

Throughout Socrates’ life, men had flocked to hear word-merchants talk in the Agora. Now mobs banged on their doors late at night demanding the expulsion of these self-same sophists from the city. Athens was no longer a state you wanted to arrive at, it was a place from which you tried to escape.

Aristophanes’ comedies, always surgically sharp, speak even more bitterly now of men like Socrates. The philosopher is not just a figure of fun, he is unpatriotic, devaluing the work of the great tragedians with his ‘hair-splitting twaddle.’9 There were not many intellectuals left in Athens by the turn of the century and there was the sense that those who were there had their backs against the wall.

Alcibiades was exiled, Nicias dead, Pericles just bones in the earth. The democratic mob, and for once this is what it was, had terminated the lives of the successful generals of Arginusae – eight men who had originally been picked as the brightest sparks that remained in a dulled city-state. Athens simply had no great men to lead it, and the bellies of the people were growing big with hunger. But the appetite for war was undiminished and Athens, it seems, still had the stomach to fight.

The next theatre of engagement between the old enemies Sparta and Athens would be on the stretch of water that now sits between Europe and Asia, the Hellespont, and in particular a spot that still demarcates the division between East and West – a place called Aegospotami on the European side of the mouth of the Bosporus. The landscape here is listless and unfriendly. Nearby are the modern-day battlegrounds of Gallipoli, where other young soldiers were slaughtered in their thousands during the First World War. It is inhospitable territory – land you have to know well if you are to survive.

This is the region that had become Alcibiades’ home patch; the Chersonese peninsula, where he had been given estates and fortified tagging posts. To all intents and purposes he had morphed into a Thracian warlord. The harshness of his life was written in the landscape around him. Learning of the planned battle at Aegospotami, Alcibiades, thundering up to the generals like a former-day knight in shining armour, just got near enough to offer advice – it is crazy, he said, to beach Athenian ships on those exposed hills that seem to grow only rock and low scrub, where the Spartans could spike them. But a ‘privateer’10 now rather than a true Athenian, his golden touch seemed cheap, fake. Alcibiades’ words were summarily dismissed. In some ways, if Athenians were going to go down, perhaps it was to their credit that they did not throw out a desperate lifeline to the rackety, trashy, charismatic athlete-aristocrat,