Samos presently fell to Lysander, and the islanders were expelled from their homes.
At Athens Sparta set up an Oligarchy of thirty men, who ruled the city with absolute powers for eight months and are known to history as “The Thirty Tyrants”. Secured by the presence in the city of a Spartan garrison, they indulged in spoliation and blood-lust to their hearts’ content. One of the Thirty quickly vanished from the scene. For Theramenes, through his friendship (of a sort) with Lysander, found himself a member of the Government, yoked with Critias, the most bloodthirsty of all ruffians (as a democrat turned tyrant was not unapt to be). Theramenes protested warmly against his colleagues’ outrages. Once again, as in 411 B.C., he came forward to advocate his favourite “Moderate” programme of a limited franchise. On this occasion the number of the privileged was to be 3000. Five thousand might seem too many. But in one respect at least conditions had changed. Spartans were now masters of the city and not foes lurking outside the impregnable walls.{734} Critias was not the man to suffer Antiphon’s fate. With great promptness he denounced Theramenes before the Athenian Council. In the debate the tide seemed running in Theramenes’ favour. Critias roughly intervened. At his gesture the police dragged his victim from the altar of refuge and haled him off for instant execution in prison. Theramenes drank the hemlock and jerked the last few drops of the poison from the beaker upon the dungeon floor, as a man who makes libations to the Gods.
“This to the gentle Critias,” he cried.{735}
So Theramenes died.
Cleophon had been an early victim of the Tyrants. That most short-sighted of popular leaders, but, like Lysander himself, at least an honest man, had been arrested and, with a travesty of the forms of law, executed before Athens capitulated. He did not live to see the final miseries which his folly had helped to inflict upon his city.
All of democratic tendencies who could escape fled terror-stricken over the borders, hurrying from the vengeance of the Oligarchs after Theramenes’ death. Many were caught and murdered. But there was one man far away overseas who kept the Thirty from peaceful slumbers so long as he remained alive. Alcibiades was living quietly in a small village of Phrygia, Melissa near Synnada, under the nominal protection of the Persian Pharnabazus. A secret message reached the satrap. It came from Lysander, but it was sent at Critias’ urging. Not until Critias had obtained a peremptory mandate from the Spartan ephors to Lysander to forward the message did Alcibiades’ old opponent reluctantly write as bidden. “Alcibiades must die. Would the Persian kindly arrange the affair?”
On a night, Alcibiades awoke from evil dreams to find the bedchamber in flames. Hastily he cast a heap of garments upon the fire and, wrapping his robe round the left arm to serve as buckler, rushed with drawn sword out to meet the assassins. The barbarians who were clustering round the door fled in terror to a distance. Then a storm of darts rained upon him, and Alcibiades fell dead. The pack of curs had pulled the lion down. He was barely forty-five years of age.{736}
Five centuries later, the Roman Hadrian set up a statue on his tomb and ordained annual sacrifices to his Shade.{737}
We may spare to repeat Grote’s censorious strictures by way of epitaph upon the morals of the two men, Theramenes and Alcibiades, whom above all others the English Radical detests. They had worked together against desperate odds to save their city, and in death they could not long be divided. Each had served his country in her most bitter need. At the final Judgment of the Last Assize many doubtless may earn that praise. Without scruple we may add the two Athenians to that Roll of Honour.
The refugees from Athens fled over the frontier to the Megarid and Boeotia. There was a revulsion of feeling at Thebes when she saw her neighbour so prostrate and tormented. Defying Lysander’s unavailing wrath, she gave hospitable welcome to Thrasybulus and other ardent democrats. The veteran general mustered seventy resolute adherents, and, the Garibaldi of Athens, crossing the mountains, seized the fort of Phyle in north Attica. An army, foot and horse, marched against him from the city, only to retreat discomfited by repulse and snowy weather. With forces now increased to 700 men Thrasybulus swooped down towards Peiraeus and entrenched himself at Munychia near the port. The enemy in a dense column fifty deep with a swarm of skirmishers flung out in front, more than five times his strength, advanced against him. He routed them. Among their dead lay Critias himself and one other of the Thirty. Thrasybulus was master of Peiraeus. The extremist leaders retired to Eleusis. Then Sparta intervened. Happily for the hero band, it was Pausanias, who was of kindly intent to Athens, and not Lysander, her implacable foe, who had the final handling of the matter. Still more happily for Thrasybulus, the King in a sharp engagement worsted the Athenian’s little army handsomely. Satisfied on the score of honour, Pausanias was in a mood to be generous. By his influence at Sparta, the warring factions came to reconciliation and a peace. Thrasybulus occupied Athens. The democracy was restored.{738} A general amnesty was proclaimed, and it was honourably observed. To the credit for this a certain Archinus has the greatest claim.{739} To the model of this amnesty the Roman Cicero made his appeal three and a half centuries later upon the morrow of Caesar’s murder.{740} In 403 B.C., in the famous “archonship of Eukleides”, Athens began to live once more. Ten years later Conon came back to Athens in triumph and built her walls again.
One by one, the generals and statesmen of the great war journey to their end. King Agis died of a sudden illness in 399 B.C. Lysander was trapped and slain in a skirmish outside the walls of Boeotian Haliartus in 395 B.C., when Sparta had rushed into war with her old ally Thebes. Few great soldiers with the credit for ending a long and bitter war have at their death been less lamented by historians and biographers. Humanity neither forgets nor forgives callous cruelty. King Pausanias, incurring unmerited censure for his enemy Lysander’s death and now blamed bitterly for the measure of mercy which he had shown to Athens, fled for his life from Sparta in 395 B.C., and, many years later, died an exile in sanctuary at Tegea. Thrasybulus perished fighting at Aspendus in 390 B.C. Of the end of Adeimantus history tells us nothing. Last survivor of Alcibiades’ friends and champions, he too passes into the dark.
Follow the gleam of Romance in Greek history. Kindled and burning brightly in the heroic struggle for liberty against the Oriental foe, it then for half a century illumined the Imperial Democracy of Athens and the people’s leaders. Athens falls, and the gleam lights on her no more. The City, for all Demosthenes’ fiery if mistaken eloquence, lies henceforward in perpetual shadow. Stat magni nominis umbra. For a few brief years the gleam hovers fitfully first over a great Spartan king, then over his greater Theban antagonist. Then it speeds north to Macedon and Alexander.
A century after Alexander’s death the gleam shines out once more in the Peloponnese, with a pale wan light over the upstart city Megalopolis and her sons, redly over the last two young hero kings of Sparta, an Agis, a Cleomenes.
Roman armies cross the Adriatic. The Romance of History bids the Greeks of the homeland a long farewell.
There are five historical puzzles in the period 411-405 B.C., viz:
(1) Alcibiades’ attitude to the Oligarchic Revolution of 411 B.C., i.e. his encouragement first, then his rebuff, of the “oligarchs”.
(2) The long delay before Alcibiades ventures to return to Athens in 408 B.C. and his hesitation and timidity as he approaches the City.
(3) The dismissal of Alcibiades after the trivial defeat of Antiochus at Notium in 407 B.C.
(4) The condemnation of the generals after Arginusae in 406 B.C. and the part played in the affair by Theramenes.
(5) The suspicion against Adeimantus of treachery at Aegospotami in 405 B.C.
My theory, which I have developed and used constantly in my narrative, is that all five puzzles may be solved by the struggle of political parties among themselves at Athens, and in particular by the real existence during these years of a “Middle” or a “Moderate” Party whose leaders were Theramenes, its political, and Alcibiades, its military head. I hold that these two men not only were linked together by common political sympathy and interest but also actually worked hand in hand together throughout. Other members of the party were Adeimantus, Aristocrates, and—with somewhat broader democratic sympathies—Thrasybulus. Cleophon was furiously hostile to the Party—to its undoing.
The validity of this theory depends partly upon its success—if it be so—in explaining the puzzles, partly upon the actual evidence showing the association together of these five men. This evidence may be tabulated briefly as follows:
Alcibiades, Adeimantus, Aristocrates, and Thrasybulus are all generals together in 407 B.C. On the fall of Alcibiades only Aristocrates of these four is general again in 406 B.C., if this is the same Aristocrates. But Beloch thinks there were two different persons of the same name—which in view of C.I.A. i. 188, is probable. Cf. Beloch, Attische Politik, p. 294, 327; Griech. Gesch. ii. p. 100.