The cup of this man’s iniquity was not full, nor his cunning nearly exhausted. By a piece of trickery, so subtle that we can hardly help feeling some sort of admiration for it, he wrote again to the Lakedaimonian admiral betraying the weak point of the defence of Samos, and offering to help him whenever he should invade the island, and gently complaining that his first letter had, by some accident, found its way into the hands of Alkibiades. Then, knowing that Astyochos would do with this overture as he had done with the other, and that it would soon come back to Samos, even as that other one had come, he advised his brother generals to strengthen with new forts the spot which he had suggested to Astyochos as the weak point of resistance. Astyochos refused to take advantage of this further apparent act of treason, and made it known to Alkibiades, who, as had been foreseen by the fox-like Phrynichos, straightway informed the Athenian generals at Samos.
The culprit, called upon for his defence to this second charge, declared that both were base calumnies got up by his enemy to ruin him, and he pointed to the fact that he had himself advised the fortifying of the very place he was now absurdly charged with betraying to the Spartans as the weak spot for their attack. This answer seemed conclusive, and, for a time, both charges were allowed to drop.
CHAPTER XIX
‘I fly from pleasure because pleasure has ceased to please. I am lonely because I am miserable, and am unwilling to cloud with my presence the happiness of others.’—Rasselas.
As soon as Peisandros and the other envoys were arrived at Athens the people assembled in their Ekklesia to hear and discuss the news from Samos. Peisandros began by moving for the recall of Phrynichos on account of incompetence and cowardice, and gave such good reasons for his motion that it was carried without difficulty. He then laid before them the business that had brought him there, and the result of his mission to the court of Tissaphernes. His task, as may well be imagined, was not an easy one—to propose before an assembly of the people the abolition of their power and existence as a governing power, and that people the Athenian demos.
His proposal, put in many ways, and with great tact, was the recall of Alkibiades, the government of the few, and an alliance with Persia which would give them the victory over Sparta.
Such a hubbub, such an outcry, as followed this address has seldom come from human lungs or from human throats. One after another the champions of the people rose, with the one answer, supported by six thousand voices, ‘Never!’ The orators declared the democracy eternal. The enemies of Alkibiades protested against the enormity of recalling one who had been convicted of the worst possible offence against the laws of Athens, one who was still civilly dead. The Eumolpidai, the privileged priests of the cult of Demeter, who felt, perhaps, as strongly for their exclusive rights and emoluments as for the honour of the goddess, reminded the assembly of the awful curses which still rested on him for his profanation of the mysteries of which they were the guardians, and which he had treated with derision and contempt.
When the opponents of his proposition had expended all their wrath, Peisandros rose again to answer them.
‘Of what use is it to preserve the mere form and semblance of a constitution when the spirit of the thing is gone, and the state is tottering? Is it not better to modify somewhat your existing laws than to lose them altogether, and with them your power of making others? We ask only that you will let your democratic forms be in abeyance while we treat with the Great King. He is ready to come to your assistance if you will meet him in a reasonable spirit. Let, then, the power of the many for a time be entrusted to the keeping of your wisest counsellors, chosen by yourselves, men whom all of you can trust; and when the clouds, which now are big and bursting with destruction, shall have passed away, you can have back again your glorious and time-honoured constitution. There is but one man who can save you in this hour of need; he is a lover of the people: that man is Alkibiades.’