Alkibiades, a tale of the Great Athenian War

by Charles Hamilton Bromby

In spite of the enthusiastic welcome with which the city, and the whole state, received him, he had not forgotten the dread sentence which had been passed on him, and which still weighed upon him, and by the laws of Athens must be carried out, unless reversed by the same tribunal which had pronounced it. That was why the meeting of the great Assembly was held immediately on his return. That was why he made his way straight to the Pnyx.

As he passed through the assembled people sitting there in silence, and ascended the stone tribune, how could he but think of the first time he had stood there and swayed their wayward mood, saving them from alliance with that oligarchic Lakedaimôn which he was afterwards to stir up against them, and then beat back in its full career of conquest?

He spoke to them simply of what he had suffered since they had thought fit to cast him out, and his hearers were moved to tears. Then he spoke modestly of some of the services he had been able to render to the state while absent from them. He deigned not to defend himself against the charges on which he had been condemned, for long ago they had been given up as baseless calumnies. But he did not spare his hearers as he touched upon the fickleness and injustice often shown by popular assemblies. Then skilfully he turned the fault from them, attributing all the wrongs to his own bad fortune, from which he had so long suffered, and to the influence of some evil genius. Then, as though brushing aside, and forgetting all his own grievances and troubles, and coming before them only as strategos, to give an account of his conduct since they had conferred that post upon him, with all his peculiar grace and terseness, he went through the actions of the late campaign. He explained graphically the present position of the enemy, and closed his speech by an appeal to them to keep up their courage, to be ever true to themselves and their traditions; true, too, to those to whom they confided the command of their forces; to hope on still, to quit themselves like men; and he, for his part, promised them a great and glorious ending to their struggle.

Then, and not till then, they broke out into a burst of loud applause. Their ringing voices could be heard in the most distant corner of the Agora and in the high Akropolis, and all men knew that he had spoken. They vowed vengeance against the authors of his banishment, as though it had been some others and not they who had brought it about. In their joy at seeing him again they dried their tears. With one voice they recalled the sentence of death which had been passed upon him, and restored to him all his wealth and patrimonial estates, which they had confiscated. They ordered the pillar on which the awful sentence was inscribed to be demolished. They made the Eumolpidai, the sacred Eleusinian priests, revoke the sacerdotal curses which they had pronounced upon him. They conferred on him the office of Autokrator, or generalissimo of all the forces, both by land and sea, which only on three other, and most perilous, occasions in the whole history of Athens was ever entrusted to anyone. It made him absolute over the other generals, and gave him complete and autocratic power in all matters which concerned the war.

When the Assembly of the Ekklesia was over his friends made him go forth again, that all might see him. He descended from the Pnyx, passed through the western gate of the Agora, where stood the great Hermes, guardian of the market-place, and, hard by, a bronze chariot drawn by four horses, where one stood life-like in the chariot who had won the prize for Athens more than three Olympiads ago. Ah, those four dear horses, he had come back to gaze upon them, as in the bronze they seemed to bound and leap for joy of the encounter. He was there,—not quite so full of life, perhaps, as he had been at the time of the race,—but where were they?

Then, passing the Eumenia portico and the theatre of Dionysos, where his chorus had sung before the whole of Athens in the Trachiniai of Sophokles, his friends led him on by the Odeion which Perikles built, with its peaked roof made of the masts of captured Persian ships, resembling the tent of Xerxes. He remembered being taken there when he was six years old to hear the contest of musicians when Perikles opened it. Then he proceeded up the street of Tripods. Upon the temple he had himself erected stood the tripod he had gained when his chorus won the prize. Not far off, a little higher up, on a smaller temple, was still the tripod once proudly placed there by poor Nikias. Then by the north side of the steep rock of the Akropolis he passed the ancient Agraulian sanctuary, where, as a young man, he put on his first armour, and swore to defend his country to the last. So past the Anakeion, the ancient temple of the Dioskoroi, they brought him, by Apollo’s grotto, to the Agora again, to the Stoa Basileios, the Court of the King Archon, near which was the Prytaneion, where the sacred fire ever burnt, and where the Prytanes and other privileged guests dined at the state’s expense.

Their dinner was preparing, as he, followed by the people who had brought him in triumph round the rock of the Akropolis, came to the Prytaneion. As a victor in the Olympic games he was entitled to his share of the meal the state provided daily for its public officers and honoured guests. Never before had he taken advantage of his privilege. He now claimed it. And the people were astonished and delighted when they saw the saviour of their country, their unconquered general, of whose luxury and indulgence so many famous tales were told, sitting amongst the citizens, enjoying the homely fare as much as any of them.

His public duties finished, he was escorted to his mother’s house by all who claimed relationship with him, and they were many now. There, in the quiet of that sacred place, we, like his Athenian supporters, may leave him for awhile. Nor shall we attempt to follow all his thoughts when he left at nightfall the solitary parent who had watched and waited for him while he had fought his country’s enemies, and while he had struggled with his great temptation to return too soon to counsel and to rule his native land.

Afterwards on his way to his own house, so long deserted, he was accosted by a well-known voice that sounded older and much sadder than when he heard it last.

‘Oh son of Kleinias, you have longed for glory, and you have it. Does it seem as sweet as you imagined?’