‘Liber captivus avis feræ consimilis est,
Semel fugiendi si data est occasio,
Satis est, nunquam post illam possis prendere.’
Plautus: Captivi.
It is not pleasant to be shut up in prison for a fortnight, expecting every day that poison, or a dagger, will make that one your last. But even to that the prisoner gets accustomed in time, and the danger of assassination begins, at last, to lend some excitement to life, spent in the horrible monotony of such a situation. Alkibiades was not afraid of death. His determined resistance to it when it had been openly decreed against him by the Athenians, and secretly by king Agis and the Ephors at Sparta, was caused as much by the sense of the injustice of it as from any fear of death itself. Now, though he enjoyed his life as much as any man, he expected death with calmness, and thought of it each day as just about to come with perfect equanimity.
Perhaps it could not have come at a time more opportune, if come it must. He had just won a splendid victory for his repentant fellow-countrymen. He had shown his devotion to them, and they had called on him to return to them and forget the past. Their bygone injustice he had forgiven; and if he died now, the victim of a conspiracy among their enemies, it would be a fresh cause for them to honour him.
But the constant thought that he was shut up at such a crisis, while the Lakedaimonians and the Persians were planning fresh attacks and strengthening their forces, while only inexperienced lieutenants were left to protect his country, hung upon him insupportably all day long, and maddened him through the long dark winter’s nights, with its constant crushing weight. He determined to risk everything in his endeavour to get back to join his comrades.
How to escape was now his constant thought. His prison at first was strictly guarded, and if he could surmount the physical difficulty of high walls, there were greater difficulties beyond.
When a man is shut up in prison with nothing but his own thoughts, those thoughts are constantly turning on some means of escape. If he is a man of great resources he will generally manage, in time, to circumvent his keepers, who only think occasionally, and as a matter of routine, how they may keep him in.
Another week passed, in dull monotony. His gaoler could tell him little of the outside world. He only heard that Tissaphernes was with Pharnabazos on the shores of the Hellespont. Then nearly another week went by in the same dead silence, broken only by the singing of the guard and the exchange of passwords as they relieved each other, while he was consumed with rage, bursting with impatience to be out and doing.