Alkibiades, a tale of the Great Athenian War

by Charles Hamilton Bromby

During the seven years that the Lakedaimonian garrison occupied the fort of Dekeleia, and ravaged the lands of Attika, it had not been safe to go beyond the city gates. Even the initiated dared not approach the sacred spot by the customary road. Some, indeed, had gone by sea, but for the most part the maimed rites, for these years, were but scantily attended. The sixth day’s solemn procession, the great event of the whole festival, had been abandoned altogether.

Alkibiades determined to restore the festival to its wonted grandeur. So the ‘spodophoroi,’ the sacred heralds, were sent out to announce the coming celebration, as of old, defying the Spartans to interfere or stop them. When the time arrived, he posted his hoplites all along the sacred way, and through the mystic defile, and the valley of Eleusis. Thus, the initiated could repair this year, as of old, to the first five days’ performance of the holy rites.

On the sixth day, at the head of his cavalry, the Strategos Autokrator marched from the foot of the Akropolis through the Agora, and, passing on his right the new temple of Theseus, took up his station at the outer Keramik gate, at the entrance of the sacred road, there to await the coming of the priests and people. Presently the procession, headed by the priests bearing the holy image, was seen slowly wending its way towards them. Then all along the sacred route, lined and defended by his soldiers, the general, on his white Thrakian charger, and in resplendent armour, led the way. The people of all ranks, following the priests, made the air resound with their ecstatic cries of ‘Iakchos! Iakchos!’ The long road was flanked by tombs and altars of the great departed, carrying men’s thoughts back to the immemorial past, the heroic mythic times; and here many of his renowned ancestors lay, objects still of reverence and veneration.

At three points on the road the river Kephisos was crossed by bridges. At each of these the bearers of the hierarchic image stopped to do the customary rites. Thence they entered the mysterious defile which, by degrees, opened into the pleasant valley of Eleusis. The hills on either side echoed to the constantly repeated cries, ‘Iakchos! Iakchos!’ till the Eleusinian plain spread out before them, rich and lovely, bathed by the blue sea on the left, the Eleusinian mountains skirting it upon the right; and straight ahead of them, its white marble walls glittering against the setting sun, shone the Akropolis of Eleusis and the temples of the goddesses.

Imposing as the procession was at all times from its numbers and from the wild devotion of those who formed it, it was trebly so on this occasion from the added spectacle of the strong, silent soldiers who lined the way, and the splendid cavalcade of knights who went before and followed in the rear of it, and from the recollection of the seven past melancholy years, when the multitude had kept mournfully at home, fearing to go to offer their observances to the great goddesses until the saviour of the city had returned to make that possible. It seemed as if he on this day was the high-priest of Demeter, as well as their chief general. The dreaded Spartan king, while he was there, kept prudently behind his walls, nor dared, for all his power, to show himself, or seek to interrupt them.

Though they had started at mid-day, so much time was taken up in the various observances along the way that the September sun had sunk behind the Akropolis long before they reached Eleusis. As the night grew dark, torches were lit one by one. The light handed on from one torch to another gave a weird look to the great throng, until the whole mass was lighted up; and thus, with wild waving of the torches, amid a blaze of light, and with cries and chants to Iakchos, ever growing louder and more wild, they reached the holy temple. So passed the festival beneath the ægis of Alkibiades; and on the last day of the proceedings, when the games were held, the gathering was attended, as of old, by the famous athletes of Greece, who came to strive for prizes and to behold the invincible Athenian. He had a twofold object in waiting for the festival. If the Spartans had come out of Dekeleia, which was not more than fifteen miles from the sacred way, he would have found an opportunity of meeting his old opponent Agis; if, as the event proved, the Spartan feared to meet him, the power which compelled such enemies to keep themselves shut up within their fortress would be made manifest.

His popularity with the mass of the Athenians had reached what might have seemed its highest point even before this; afterwards it became something like idolatry. This free people forgot even their love of liberty in their fanatic zeal to show fresh proofs of their blind confidence in him. Only religious fervour, warmed by the recent worship of the goddess, and worked up by ceremonial observances and strange, half-maddening rites within the temple, can explain the step which a large number of them were prepared to take.

To gain a faint conception of what these religious feelings were we must, as far as possible, put ourselves in the place of the initiated, and of those who were about to go through the process of initiation—almost the sole religious teaching of the age, the guide which taught them how to obtain the blessings of well-being here, and of an eternity of peace and happiness in the Elysian regions after death.

Added to this religious zeal, felt more especially among the less cultured classes, there was the patriotic gratitude of nearly all. Most of the more educated had felt for some time that a change must be made in the institutions of the state, if she was to combat successfully against the oligarchic and despotic enemies gathering around her, who had not the disadvantage of the unstable and variable policy incident to government by the voices of the masses.

Certain it is that, seizing the opportunity offered by the present feeling of the population, the numberless clubs which honeycombed Athenian politics, and represented the majority of those citizens who took the chief part in the affairs of state, came forward, and urged Alkibiades to suppress the constitution, to banish the demagogues and the orators, who, they declared, had been the constant cause of all their troubles, and suggested that he who was already autocrat in war, master of the forces by land and sea, both in and out of Athens, and feared by the whole of Greece, should accept from them a kingly crown.