Alkibiades, a tale of the Great Athenian War

by Charles Hamilton Bromby

When he returned from Potidaia, he found other troubles disturbing the democratic city. The people, dissatisfied with the conduct of the war, and maddened by the plague, turned on their best friend. Perikles, who had subdued the oligarchs, had raised the people to power, had endowed them with the privileges they enjoyed, and had for thirty years guided the popular government of the state so wisely and so strongly that most even of his oligarchic opponents were contented with his guidance, was now the object of the people’s anger.

We can imagine the thoughts with which the old man came home from the Assembly which decreed his degradation and his punishment. He had made Athens what she was. He had guarded her from foes without, the people from their foe within, ever ready to rob them of their rights. It was in his mind that had first risen up the idea of a great Hellenic empire, one confederation, which should include all the self-governing states and towns of Greek origin, with Athens at its head. It had been his hope to call together a pan-Hellenic congress, to consider the rights, the wrongs, the divergent interests, of them all, that they might proceed together, self-defended from barbarian attack, to higher intellectual and ethic greatness, to even nobler efforts in their arts and in their literature—a policy which, had he been allowed an opportunity to carry it out unto its end, must have gone near to realize the great ideal of his hopes, and would certainly have saved Athens and the whole of Greece from the catastrophe which was now about to be unfolded.

It was as a symbol of imperial headship that he had caused Athens to be decorated with the splendid monuments that arose within the city in his time. And now, awakening from his dream of what she—what all Greece—might have been, he found Athens threatened upon every side, and himself marked by her people as the victim for their sacrifice.

Harder blows came on him nearer home. He had seen his old companions, his colleagues, pass away. The plague bore off his only sister, then his eldest son, and then his Paralos, his youngest, best beloved. As the old man placed the funeral wreath upon that head, the emotion he had mastered hitherto quite mastered him; he fell down, overwhelmed with woe. The human mass which ruled in Athens, even they were touched at that sad spectacle. The people recollected what he had done for them, for Athens; they called their leader back to power as suddenly as they had driven him away.

But Perikles was broken down. He felt his sun was setting. His far-reaching plans had failed. He longed for peace and for silent converse with his sorrow. Alkibiades, the bright, the rising sun, came to his old friend and tutor, whose glory was departing, and, after much persuasion, induced the old warrior and chief to return to lead the people.

Once more he heard the shouts of gratulation as he raised a trembling arm and swayed them as of old. Once more his eyes, grown dim with age and grief, saw the vast sea of faces gazing at him as he kept the huge concourse silent with his word. But the elasticity was gone. The heart within him rose not as it had used to do. His day was done. Within another year the greatest of Greek statesmen was taken, not reluctantly, to his last resting-place. And the world, save for the undying works he left behind him, went on as though he had not been.

Conflicting forces rose at once. Oligarchs and democrats, headed by Nikias and Kleon, contended for the prize the dead leader had abandoned.

Nikias, representing the rich old families, and supported by them, was of high birth and wealthy. He was timid, cautious, safe and superstitious, narrow-minded, honest, and respectable.

Kleon was of the middle, trading class. Many of this sort, during the last thirty years of prosperity, had become wealthy. He was the first who presumed to bid for power. It is one of the strange phenomena of nature that after pestilence comes great fecundity. This has often been observed, especially after the plague which ravaged Europe in 1348 and 1349 of our era. The air is cleared, as it were, by the storm which has passed over. Those who survive, too, get to themselves such courage they begin to imagine they are exempt from ordinary dangers. They become rich with the wealth of those who have died, and rejoice in a new and opulent existence. At Athens life burst out anew in the fulness of enjoyment.

None knew how to enjoy it more than Alkibiades. We need not dwell upon the life he led for the next few years. His mind, his ambition, was expanding. He was nearing the age when he should take his share in the government of the Athenian empire. He had enriched his mind with all the knowledge of the Greeks at the highest period of their culture. Nature had endowed him with a genius to discover the right course to take in every emergency, as if by intuition; so that, apparently without effort, he divined the course events would take. In him she joined courage and resource with a circumspect solicitude seldom found together with promptness in action.