“You have heard I dare say very much evil of me, and I cannot deny that much of it is perfectly true. It ill becomes a man to complain of circumstances, for everyone, I take it, can make his own life and if he goes to ruin has only himself to blame for it. Yet the gods, or fate, or whatever it is that rules the world, were certainly adverse to me from the beginning. My father fell at Coronea when I was but a mere child, and the loss of a father is especially damaging when his son is rich and noble. Every one seems to agree in spoiling the boy, the lad, the young man, who is the master of his own fortune. I know that I was fooled to the top of my bent. However, that is all past, and the free man who lets others turn him about to their own purposes has nothing to say in his own defence; and I had at least one good thing on my side of which if I had been so minded I might have made good use. Socrates never wearied of convicting me out of my own mouth of folly and ignorance, and he knew my great weakness and told me of it in the most unsparing fashion. I remember once how he convicted me of what I know has been the great fault of my life. ‘If,’ he said, ‘you can convince the Athenians that you deserve to be honored as no man, not even Pericles himself deserved, if you gain an equal name among the other Greeks and barbarians, if you cross over from Europe and meddle with matters in Asia, all these things will not satisfy you. You desire to be nothing less than master of the whole human race.’ That perhaps was somewhat exaggerated, but I certainly have had big schemes in my head, bigger than I ever had, or could hope to have, the means of carrying out. My hopes took in all Greece, Persia, Carthage, the Western barbarians who inhabit the shores of the ocean, and I know not what else. It was too great a structure to build on the slight foundation of an Athenian dock-yard; it was piling Olympus and Ossa and Pelion on the hill of Hymettus, and such structures are sure to fall even without the thunder-bolt of Zeus. Yet it is only fair to myself to say that in my ambitions I did think of my country as well as of myself; and I think that I have not always had fair play in carrying them out. There was the expedition to Sicily, for instance. I suppose that no one will ever speak of it but as a piece of hair-brained folly into which I was the means of leading Athens. Looked at by the event, it seems so, I allow, and yet it might have succeeded. Indeed it was within an iota of succeeding, and this though the people showed the incredible folly of putting as senior in command, a man who hated the whole business. Even Nicias almost took Syracuse. If they had only left me without a colleague or with colleagues who would have yielded to my counsels! But what did they do? Just at the critical time they recalled the man whom everyone in the expedition, from the first to the last, identified with its success; and why did they recall me? On that trumpery charge of having broken the Hermæ.[50] You would like to ask me, I know, whether I had anything to do with the matter. No; I had not, but I could have told them all about it if I had had the chance. As it was, they were ready to listen to any one but me. Why, there was an outrageous liar came forward, and declared he had seen the whole thing done by the light of the moon; and on the night it was done there was no moon at all. But I had enemies, personal enemies who would stick at nothing as long as they could injure me. And here I must confess a fault, a fault that has been fatal to me. I deserved to have enemies. I made them by my annoyance and insolence; and if they ruined me, and, as I think, my country with me, I have only myself to blame. You would like to know how I justify myself for what I did after my banishment, for getting Sparta to help Syracuse against my own country? I do not justify myself at all. It was madness, tho’ it was only too successful. But it made me frantic to think what a chance, what a splendid opportunity for myself and for Athens, the fools who were in power at home were throwing away. No; on that point I have nothing to say for myself. But since then I have honestly tried to do the best that I could for the city. And if the Athenians could only have trusted me and had had a little more patience, I believe that I could have saved them. But it is always the same story with them; they must have what they want at once, and if they don’t get it, some one has to suffer. How could they expect that I could put right at once all that had been going wrong for years?”
Such was the substance of what Alcibiades said to his guest on the many occasions on which they discussed these matters, said of course, with a variety of details and a wealth of illustration, which it is impossible to reproduce. More than once Callias asked his host what were his views and expectations of the future of the war. He found that Alcibiades did not take a cheerful view of the prospects of the campaign that would be soon beginning.
“I was always afraid,” he said, “that the victory at Arginusæ would be only a reprieve, a postponing of the evil day. The effort which Athens then made was too exhausting to be repeated—her next fleet will be nothing like as good as the last, and the last had hard enough work to win the day. And then there was the disastrous folly and crime of putting the generals to death. Mind, I don’t say that they were not to blame; but I do say that to kill the only good officers the city had, even if they had deserved death ten times more than they did, was mere madness. Whom have they got to put in their place? Conon is a man who knows his business and would do his duty, but as for the rest,” he went on, anticipating a witticism which was made many hundred years afterwards by an English statesman, “I can only say that I hope they will inspire the enemy with half the terror with which they inspire me.”
CHAPTER XV.
ÆGOS POTAMI.
Alcibiades had established a system of communication with all the principal stations in the Ægean which gave him early information of what was going on.
Early in the new year (405) intelligence reached him at his castle, that Lysander was coming out from Sparta to assume the command of the allied fleet. This news affected Alcibiades very considerably.
“I anticipated this,” he said to his guest after the evening meal on the day when the news had reached him, “and it is the worst thing that could have happened for Athens. There was just a chance that the Spartans, who, happily for us, are very stupid and obstinate, would stick to their rule that no man should be appointed naval commander-in-chief thrice. But they had, as I heard from a friend in Chios, a very strong requisition from the allies to appoint Lysander, and so they have sent him out again, saving their rule by appointing a nominal chief, a man called Arrachus, who, of course, is a mere figure head. Now Lysander is by far the ablest man that the Spartans have got; he is quite unscrupulous; he is a bitter enemy of ours; and what is worst of all, he can do anything that he pleases with Cyrus. You have not been campaigning for two or three years without finding out that the Persian money bags are the real weights that make the scales of fate go up and down. Last year Callicratidas was crippled because Cyrus, at this very Lysander’s request, kept his purse strings tight. Now everything will be straight and easy, and before two months are over the Spartans will have as good a fleet as money can make.” The year wore slowly on. The long Thracian winter, which Callias, though not unused to cold weather in Athens found exceedingly severe, yielded at last to spring, and spring in its turn to summer. All the while the news which reached Bisanthe continued to have a gloomy complexion. At Miletus, as well as in other of the mainland towns, thorough-going partisans of Lysander were installed in power. Cyrus had been called away to Upper Asia, where the old king, his father, was lying sick to death, and had left all his treasuries at the disposal of the Spartan admiral. With this supply of money the pay of the sailors had been increased, and new ships had been laid down on the stocks. In March the Athenian fleet sailed for the seat of war. It was larger than any that had been sent forth by the city in recent years, for it numbered no less than one hundred and eighty ships; but private letters gave an unfavorable account of the way in which it was equipped, and officered. This adverse opinion continued to be borne out by the news that arrived from time to time of its doings. It seemed to be moving about aimlessly and fruitlesly, always behind, always in the wrong place. It offered battle to Lysander, who lay in harbor near Ephesus, but in vain. The wary Spartan had no mind to fight but at his own time, and the Athenian admirals had no way of compelling him. Then the ships were scattered in plundering expeditions along the mainland coasts and among the islands which had accepted the Spartan alliance. The gain was small, for the booty was insignificant, but the demoralization and relaxation of discipline were great. About midsummer followed a bold maneuver on the part of Lysander. He sailed across the Ægean to the coast of Attica, where his sudden appearance caused no little consternation. The Athenian commanders were as usual behind hand. If they had heard of this movement as soon as they ought, and had been ready to follow immediately, it is quite possible that they might have inflicted a damaging blow on their adversaries. As it was, the news was long in reaching them, and when it came, found them with their fleet scattered and unprepared. Accordingly they missed their chance of forcing Lysander to an engagement off an hostile shore, an engagement, too, which he would hardly have been able to decline. Lysander crossed and recrossed the Ægean without molestation, and shortly afterward sailed northward.
Alcibiades, whose intelligence department was, as has been said, admirably organized, received information that this movement was intended, and in consequence took up his quarters at a little fort which he possessed at the extremity of the Chersonesus. He and his guest had not been there more than a day when the Spartan fleet came in sight. He watched it pass at a distance of two or three miles, with eager interest.