Alkibiades, a tale of the Great Athenian War

by Charles Hamilton Bromby

He noticed the hard smile upon the face of perfect beauty. It came for a moment and was gone.

The open-hearted sailor, for all his knowledge of his master, could not help feeling astonishment at the cool reception of the news which he had brought, the terrible nature and effect of which had not been absent from his mind by day or night since it had been entrusted to him at Sparta.

‘Get you as swift a horse as you can find at once. Meet me outside the eastern gate in half an hour. Let no one think that you have seen me.’

Agrestides went out. Alkibiades put on a Spartan sailor’s dress, got his horse himself, and in less time than he had mentioned was out of Miletos by the eastern postern.

Agrestides was there before him. They went for some distance in an easterly direction, and then, turning sharply to the south, struck the road to Teichioussa. They rode in silence through the night. Alkibiades knew the road. He had lately been that way when he saved Miletos for the Spartans. Before dawn they were at Teichioussa. There he found some Persians he knew, and learnt from them that Tissaphernes was at Magnesia. After a short rest he got fresh horses and a Persian robe, and the two set out again.

Throughout the past night’s ride along the solitary road Alkibiades had spoken no word. His companion could not see his face. There was that within him for which no words of human language have been found. For all his faults—and by this time those who have followed his career thus far may perhaps think he had some,—there lay beneath them all a well of generosity. Among the varying qualities which went to make up that mixture of divergent sentiments which we call his character was an overwhelming, innate love of justice. When that was outraged, there arose within him the deadliest and most enduring desire for revenge. He enjoyed life enormously, and had that keen pleasure in the mere consciousness of being, which others, less gifted, cannot imagine, and he wished that all other men should enjoy their lives. He loved his ease, his happiness, his indulgences; he wished that others should be happy; the idea of happiness was, for the most part at that time, confused with pleasure and indulgence. But above all this there was a loathing of, a nervous shrinking from, anything which in any way could be regarded by anyone as a taint of cowardice. ‘I would rather die than be a coward,’ he had once said to Sokrates while he was an ardent, dreamy boy. These are nearly the first words we find recorded of him. When he once saw another boy of nearly twice his size taking by force a smaller boy’s playthings from him, he rushed at him in such fury that he had thrashed and smashed him before the bully had recovered from his astonishment. It was this generous love of right as much as his extraordinary gifts of intellect and beauty and excellence in all manly exercises which had made him an uncrowned king among the boys of Athens, and would have left him king of men throughout his life had not the spirit of injustice been too strong for him.

And now, as he rode silently through the dark night to Teichioussa, his wrongs came over him in their intense reality. It was only the old determination still—to die rather than be, or be thought to be, a coward—which prevented their weight from overpowering him. It was not vindictiveness. You may call it pride, vanity, spirit of revenge, or what you will, but it was rather a burning sense of wrong, whenever he found that wrong was being done, and a determination to set it right; a determination to be stopped by nothing till he should have conquered the injustice, at whatever cost; a stubborn resolve to set himself right in the eyes of men—this is what has been mistaken in him for vindictiveness, and by those who have not read his character below the surface, for selfishness and vanity. In fact, when a great deed was to be done, however much it clashed with self-interest and vanity, no one showed a greater disregard of self than he did.

In a sense this was in itself a species of pride or even vanity. He had his share of both. In what great human action is there no admixture of vanity? Is there, or has there ever been, a man who, when doing the most unselfish, self-denying, humble work of charity, has not some far-hidden and scarcely conscious sense of behaving rather better than some others would have done? Has there ever been anyone who would devote his whole existence to alleviate the sufferings of others if he were quite certain that no one would ever know what he had done, and that he would never get any possible reward, of any sort, for doing it?

We are not defending him in all he did. We only seek impartially to analyze the feelings which had moved him in the past, and were now again to do so, and to rescue his memory from the injustice that has been done him by those who imagine him to have been a mere voluptuary, and who, not able to understand his character, mistake his apparent carelessness for flippancy, and are led away by contemporary writers whose personal hostility to him has made them seek to depreciate, and even to distort, where they cannot deny, the heroic actions which they are forced to admit.

Against his natural inclinations and sympathies he had adopted the side of the populace at Athens. Having chosen it, he fought repeatedly for them, and would have gone on fighting for them, had they been true to him, as he would have served his country’s cause for ever if it had let him.