Alkibiades, a tale of the Great Athenian War

by Charles Hamilton Bromby

There he met his colleague Lamachos cruising near the harbour, longing to be inside it. The two generals with their conjoined force went back to Katané, taking a Syrakusan vessel by the way. On reaching Katané, they received permission to enter the town without troops. They ventured to address an assembly of the citizens. While Alkibiades was endeavouring to persuade them to join the Athenian alliance, a party of Athenian soldiers who had landed secretly from the ships forced one of the city gates that had been left unguarded, and suddenly appeared in the assembly while Alkibiades was speaking. The Syrakusan party amongst the citizens fled; the rest, without waiting for further arguments, voted for the Athenian alliance.

Alkibiades then made a reconnaissance of Syrakuse alone by sea, and landed with a body of two hundred heavy-armed men nearly two miles north of the town. He came upon an outpost on the high ground guarded by a small body of Syrakusan soldiers, whom he easily overcame, and captured a store of arms and provisions.

He had been able to form a good idea of the strength of the greater and the smaller port against an invading fleet; he now saw the weak point of the defences on the land side. But, as he was making his observations, he did not notice that a body of cavalry had left the town by the north-western gate, and had come round the rising ground immediately behind him, while a force of some three or four hundred light-armed troops were threatening him upon the left flank.

He thus found himself cut off from his ships. To retreat before the cavalry was impossible, while to stand there to receive a charge on one side by the infantry, and in the rear by the cavalry, was to await certain death or capture.

A strong wind which had rendered the landing difficult, and made the anchorage of the ships precarious, was blowing from the south as these horsemen rode down from the high ground to the spot where Alkibiades and his men now stood at bay, prepared to receive the charge and to die like men.

High tufts of long grass, which had been dried by the September heat, grew on all sides of them. The wind bent the long yellow blades as it swept over them. To set light to this inflammable growth was the inspiration of a leader who was seldom at a loss in the greatest extremities. The fire rose at once. The wind increased its fury. It caught the stunted olive-trees and under-growth, as it surged onward full in the face of the Syrakusan cavalry. The horses reared and plunged, and turned and fled in disorder as the flames came on and the smoke half smothered them.

Nor were the light-armed troops much better off. For Alkibiades ordered his men to charge. They had the advantage of a slight declivity, and so the heavy-armed Athenians emerged, as it were, from out the fire and smoke, and marching through the light-armed Syrakusans, cut them to pieces as they went, and reached their ships in safety. Alkibiades returned straightway to Katané.

As he sailed away, like another Ulysses defying Polyphemos, he had some cause to feel satisfied with what he had accomplished. He had just escaped from what at one time looked like a very serious predicament, and in spite of a timorous, procrastinating colleague on one side, and a rash, unthinking enthusiast upon the other, he had done good work for Athens and her allies. He had arranged to get a footing in Messana whenever he thought it expedient to land troops there. Naxos was entirely with him. He had established a base of operations against Syrakuse at Katané, where the greater part of the fleet now lay.

This was something to have done in the short time he had been in Sicilian waters. He had done much more than this: he had discovered a point of attack on Syrakuse, and though it might require some sacrifice of ships and men, he saw that, in its present state of defence, this chief port and town of Sicily would be theirs without much difficulty, if attacked at once.

Such were his hopes as he returned, well satisfied, to Katané. The clouds which had been hanging over him since he left home lifted and almost disappeared. His high spirits rose again as he thought of his entry as a conqueror into Athens, bringing with him the spoils of a mighty city, and offering to his countrymen the gratitude of a people delivered from oppression, and the sovereignty of Syrakuse, and of the whole of Sicily, all to be laid at his country’s feet.