Alkibiades, a tale of the Great Athenian War

by Charles Hamilton Bromby

Julius Cæsar.

The friends who had known the strategos in old days thought that he would, for some time at least, enjoy his hard-earned rest, and spend his time in such pursuits as they knew he loved, and take his fill of the intellectual and sensuous delights of Athens.

On the day after the joyous one we have just witnessed he began his work as sole absolute general of the state. There was plenty of work to do. Athenian citizens had grown disheartened, and become lax in military discipline. He began by making all those who could bear arms, from boys of fifteen to men of sixty, meet every day for warlike exercise. He instituted a series of alarms, on hearing which, at any hour of the day or night, everyone seized his arms, and ran to his appointed post. Besides superintending these exercises himself, and providing that the ordinary soldiers of all classes were duly furnished with all things necessary for their duties, he raised the knights, to which order he belonged, to the highest point of excellence, making them complete in their own peculiar drill, and teaching them other exercises which he had learnt in Thrace and Persia.

He obtained one hundred new triremes from the state, provided chiefly by the spoils and tribute that he had brought with him from the Asiatic cities. While half the day was taken up with the land forces and the land defences, the other half he spent on the water, attending to the drilling of the sailors and the rowers at their work. No one was ever more severe or strict in details, especially as regarded the watchfulness that he required from the sentinels, and if some of the lazier or more stubborn of his soldiers did sometimes complain among themselves, no general was ever more implicitly obeyed. Not a murmur was heard openly against his exacting, self-denying, necessary discipline through all the three months spent in this laborious business. The heart of the people seemed changed; or, rather, the old heart which had beat so firmly when Miltiades led them, was renewed within them. Their pleasures were postponed. They recognised that this was not a time to indulge themselves in their usual favourite amusements. Even the comic playwright, who made fun of everything and everyone on all occasions, grew almost serious at this time.

At the end of three months Athens possessed a compact array of troops such as it had never had before. The huge fleet, with its complement of sailors, perfectly equipped, lay in the port, ready at the given signal to raise anchor and set sail. But the celebration of the Eleusinian mysteries was near, and the general put off the departure of his forces till after they, with all the other citizens, had taken part in this great festival. Messengers, for the first time for years, were sent through the neighbouring states, to announce the approach of the festival, so that all might attend who wished to be present at, or take part in, the games which followed.

It is impossible for us to realize the full importance of these sacred rites. Founded originally on the universal sense of helplessness in man, his dependence on the mysterious powers of Nature which, unmoved by him, yield him his sustenance in life, and on his belief in a Divine sustaining power when the strength of life is failing him—and thus based upon his dependence on food in life and on God in death, the Eleusinian mysteries grew out of the poetic mysticism of the earliest religious reverence.

The corn seed buried in the earth is represented by Persephone, who, while gathering flowers in a vale, ‘herself of gloomy Dis was gathered.’ Carried by him beneath the earth, she became wife of the King of Hades, and queen of the region of the dead. But Demeter, her mother, in frantic grief, after wandering through the world, came to Eleusis, and dwelt there, while the earth, in sympathy with her, withheld its fruits. The race of man was about to perish for want of food, when Zeus, in pity of its helpless misery, allowed Persephone to return to the earth and spend six months of every year with her fond mother;—a legend symbolic of the happy springing up of the new corn and of the joyful harvest.

Thus, the religious instinct of man to pay worship and devotion to the giver of his earthly sustenance became mingled with the devotion, no less natural to him, by which he sought to be sustained and strengthened after death by the powerful goddess of the regions of the dead. Much of the religion of the Athenian Greeks centred round this myth, and the later additions to it. The greater mysteries, which only the initiated knew, or could assist in celebrating, took the place with them of the religious exercises and devotions and dogmas of a later age.

On the first day the initiated gathered together at Eleusis. On the second they made long symbolical ablutions, as if to free themselves from every taint of sin. On the third day they offered sacrifices, as some small return to the divine mother and her child, who gives to helpless men the necessary fruits of earth, and a recognition of their dependence upon her bounty. On the fourth and fifth days other rites were celebrated, which were not to be divulged; and on the sixth, the greatest day of all, the citizens set out from Athens to accompany the wondrous little statue of Iakchos, a son of Demeter, in pompous march from Athens to Eleusis.

This was an addition to the earlier, simpler mysteries, and had been imported from the East, or perhaps from Krete. Iakchos was really the infant Bakchos, representing the generative power of nature, as well as the stimulating force of wine, and was an introduction of a later time, when men were not content with the purer celebration of the innocent harvest of the corn-fields, with the bread and honey of their fathers, but must have wine from the grape-juice too.