“Good evening gentlemen,” he said. “Will you welcome into your company a man who is already drunk, completely plastered, or shall we just give Agathon a garland, which is why we came, and go away?”
Everyone shouted for him to stay. He lay down next to Agathon, whom he kissed and crowned with his wreath. Only then did he notice that Socrates was also sharing the couch. Pretending that the philosopher was stalking him, he said: “Good god, what have we here? Socrates? Ambushing me again?”
Alcibiades was asked to improvise a speech in praise of love, but excused himself because he was drunk. Instead, if allowed, he wanted to deliver a eulogy of Socrates, his mentor and erastes. “If I compliment anyone but him, he won’t be able to keep his hands off me!” “Be quiet,” said Socrates.
Having obtained permission to proceed, Alcibiades claimed that Socrates was a more moving orator than Pericles and compelled him to realize that he himself was still a “mass of imperfections.” He told a long anecdote about an attempt he made on Socrates’ virtue. He gave him dinner and persuaded him to stay the night. When the lights were out and they were alone, Alcibiades threw his arms around Socrates, but failed to get any response. In other words, the philosopher lived up to the fine aspirations in his speech about rising above sexual desire.
Alcibiades went on to speak of Socrates’ bravery in battle, not only at the battle of Delium, but at another engagement when he was wounded and Socrates rescued both him and his weapons.
When Alcibiades finished, everyone laughed. The joke was that he had turned upside down the usual order of things in single-sex love affairs. He was the youthful eromenos, but instead of being demure and desire-free, as was proper, he had been forward and randy. On the other hand, Socrates was a most passive and unaroused erastes.
—
A crowd of revelers found the front door of Agathon’s house open and joined the party in the dining room. All order broke down and the rest of the evening was given over to heavy drinking. By dawn everyone had dozed off except for the host, Aristophanes, and, of course, Socrates, who was still holding forth. Agathon and Aristophanes gave way to his arguments and then fell asleep themselves.
Dawn broke and the philosopher got up and left. He walked to a gymnasium called the Lyceum where he had a wash, spent the day as normal, and towards evening went home to bed.
19
Downfall
At dawn on a fine June day in 415 almost the entire population of Athens poured out of the city and walked down between the Long Walls to the great port of Piraeus and the sea. They came to see the fleet before it set sail. One hundred warships were anchored in the harbor, a splendid sight. Although the state had paid for their construction, ship captains had spent their own money on carved and painted figureheads and on general fittings. If they were rich enough they may have paid for the making of the ship itself, as a gift to their city. They topped up the sailors’ state salary of one drachma a day in order to recruit the finest crews. Each was anxious that his own vessel stand out from the rest for smartness and speed. Everywhere polished armor gleamed and glinted in the morning light.
Sixty triremes were manned for fighting at sea and forty transports for carrying at least five thousand hoplites or heavy infantry, of whom about one third were Athenians and the rest allies, as well as archers and slingers. Up to 17,000 men pulled the oars. There was also a large number of vessels to convey wheat and barley and other items. Surprisingly only one ship was reserved for cavalry and carried a mere thirty mounts; the lack of cavalry was to be made good by allies in Sicily. (Other smaller craft and allied warships had previously been instructed to rendezvous at the island of Corcyra.)
Thucydides observed: “This expedition…was by far and away the costliest and most splendid force of Hellenic troops that up to that time had ever been sent out by a single city.” It was a hugely expensive military venture, but a few years of relative peace had replenished the city’s exchequer. The human capital lost from the plague more than ten years in the past had been restocked, at least in part, with a new generation of young men.
Once the crews and men had gone aboard, a trumpet called for silence. Everyone recited the customary prayers for those in peril on the sea, following the words of a crier, and hymns were sung. Then wine was poured into bowls and officers and men offered libations from gold or silver cups.
Once all this had been done, the fleet set sail in column and triremes raced each other as far as the island of Aegina. The expedition sailed around the Peloponnese en route to its destination—Sicily.
What can Athens have been thinking of, to abandon the main theater of war, the isles of Greece and the Aegean Sea, in favor of an adventure in the faraway west?
—
Before that question is answered another, more pressing one presents itself. What had happened to the general peace that Athens and Sparta had negotiated with so much trouble in 421?
Aristophanes’ exuberant comedy Peace captured a mood of enthusiasm that citizens could now safely return to the countryside and tend their farms again and that profiteering city tradesmen were going bankrupt. He makes his hero, a farmer, say:
Now we can wank and sing altogether at high noon, as the old Persian general did, when he crooned “What joy! What bliss! What delight!”
But, as reported, a problem had arisen from the outset. Sparta had promised more than it could deliver. Its allies—Corinth, Megara, and Boeotia—refused to cooperate and hand back to Athens places presently under their control, as stipulated.
In particular, the city of Amphipolis, where Brasidas and Cleon had died, refused to be transferred and the Spartan army there was disinclined to force it to do so and left for home. So, not unreasonably, the ecclesia declined to return the prisoners of war captured on Sphacteria.
To the stone inscription of the treaty this sentence was added: “The Spartans have not kept their oaths.” They were also becoming desperate. This was not just because they wanted their men back, but because a thirty-year treaty with their old enemy in the Peloponnese, the powerful polis of Argos just south of Corinth in the northeastern corner of the peninsula, was about to expire. There was an alarming risk that Argos, freed at last from its entente, might combine with Athens against Sparta. To avert this prospect a Lacedaemonian proposal emerged of going beyond an accord between two belligerents and entering into a full-on fifty-year defensive alliance between Sparta and Athens. Nicias, who headed the peace faction and wanted an enduring friendship with the old enemy, readily agreed. At last the prisoners were sent back, but Pylos and Cythera were retained against the handover of Amphipolis.
This was an unsatisfactory state of affairs and the various parties schemed against one another unrelentingly. For a time a plan was put forward for Sparta’s onetime Peloponnesian allies to create a new league headed by Argos and including anyone who wanted to be included (provided, of course, that they were neither Sparta nor Athens). Then Argos, whose record of treacherous neutrality during the Persian Wars had never been forgotten, lost its nerve and sent an embassy to Lacedaemon to negotiate a new long-term treaty.
Meanwhile Athens was furious with Sparta for making up to the Boeotians despite the fact that not only had they not handed back the frontier fort they were meant to do, but had demolished it.
At this awkward juncture a familiar personality intervened, who was determined to make as much trouble as he could—Alcibiades. In 420 he was elected strategos for the first time when he was thirty (the earliest legal age) or a little older and, after Cleon’s death in 422, became a leading man in the state.