Another Assembly was summoned to meet in a few days, to pass measures for the due equipment of the fleet, and to provide the necessary funds, so that whatever the newly-appointed generals might ask for should be at their disposal. This Assembly was even more crowded than the first, and all were silent when Nikias appeared before them in the Tribune.
The people expected the demands about to be made upon them would be large; they were prepared to meet them. To everyone’s astonishment Nikias began his speech, not by encouraging them to put all their hearts into the work they had decided to undertake, and to give those to whose care they had entrusted the Athenian future a liberal support, but by an urgent protest against the expedition altogether. He entreated them, with tears in his eyes and tears in his voice, to reconsider their decision and recall their vote.
This was a course unprecedented in the annals of the state, and against an express law, which made it penal to reopen a matter which had been discussed, and upon which a vote had been already given. He admitted this. It was a proof of the respect in which they held his character that they heard him patiently. It was a signal proof of the dignity with which they clothed their debates in the national Assembly that they listened to him without interruption.
He used the well-known arguments against the dangers of a war, and especially one so far away from home, and dwelt upon the greater wisdom of strengthening the empire that they had already than of seeking to extend it.
‘I have no selfish motive in objecting to the war. War has ever been my field of honour. By that won I my distinctions. My whole life is a proof that I fear not for myself—I fear only for my country and its worthy citizens. Those I consider to be worthy citizens who know how first to value their own estate and protect it from ruinous expenditure.’ Then turning towards his young fellow-general: ‘If anyone, elated by being but just now made a strategos of an enormously important expedition, before a fitting age has given him due experience and wisdom, would urge you onward to this fatal enterprise, it is because he thinks to shine in all the pomp of war and make a show with his fine equipage and prancing horses, and turn the dignity of general into a fit occasion—ye gods! a fit occasion—to indulge his luxury and grandeur. Oh, men of Athens, let not such a one imperil the safety—nay, the very existence—of us all that he may make himself conspicuous. Remember, there are citizens who could not only dissipate their private fortunes upon fine studs of horses and such-like frivolities, but afterwards make shipwreck of the state. I tremble when I see a band of rash young men before me, sitting close together, near their leader, and I exhort the older men not to be frightened from their opposition to this crazy work by fear of hearing the epithet of cowards applied to them.’
No other would have dared to speak at that time in such a way of the leader and favourite of the people, or thus to oppose the general desire. The people not only let him speak, but allowed the whole question of the expedition to be reopened. Several spoke in favour of the war, a few against it. At length Alkibiades ascended the tribune. He felt the speech of Nikias had made an impression upon many. Not only was the war he had so much at heart, together with his generalship, at stake; a personal attack, as everybody knew, had been made upon him. It had been suggested that he was ruining his patrimony. This was, indeed, a serious charge, for, were it proved, it would, by the law of Athens, disable him from holding any public office.
He began by answering, in perfect taste, the attack of Nikias. He apologized for speaking of himself at all. He regretted, he said, that he had been forced to do so by the ungenerous treatment he had met with at the hands of his brother-general, his elder colleague.
‘As to my prodigality and the prancing steeds you have just now heard so much about, for whose honour and at whose expense were those horses bred and taken to the pan-Hellenic meeting? If I did spend something of my patrimonial estate in rearing them, was it not for Athens that I did it? And if with them I won the greatest prize in Greece, it was that you, not I alone, might reap the glory. I only bore the charges. And if I have many times equipped great triremes for the state at larger cost than some other citizens are wont to undertake, was it not for Athens that I did it? If I have put finer choruses upon the stage, and furnished forth my public functions with greater splendour, it was that you and strangers from all over Greece might see and hear them, and that they might bring the greater praise, not to myself, but to my country.
‘If you have shown me honour now in choosing me strategos, and the colleague of such a well-known general as Nikias, it is not for any merit of my own, but for the glory reflected on me by my ancestors. You have not forgotten all my great-grandfather Kleisthenes did for the democracy of Athens when he expelled the tyrants and oligarchs, and’ (turning to Nikias) ‘all who favoured them; nor have you forgotten my grandfather Alkibiades; nor my dear father Kleinias, who taught me by his life and actions to spare nothing of my own in your defence, who lived for the people, who died for Athens. Why need I speak of Perikles, my cousin and my tutor, whose memory is fresh in the minds of every one of you? It is as the scion of such a steadfast race that ye have honoured me, not for myself; and may the gods grant that in this expedition I prove worthy of that race and of your choice.’
He went on to speak of the envy small minds feel at another’s rise. He touched on what, during his comparatively short career, he had been able to accomplish—the league of the Peloponnesian states against their chief enemy, the strengthening of the ports of Patrai and Argos.