In 407 after four years in the field Alcibiades at last decided it was safe to go home. He had proved himself, and his friends in the city guaranteed him a warm and, more important, a safe welcome. When he sailed into Piraeus, a great crowd of well-wishers was waiting—just as they had been the last time they had seen him, leading the fleet as it set off to Sicily on that day of splendor in 415.
He anchored offshore but, fearing an ambush by his enemies, did not immediately disembark. Instead he stood on the deck and kept looking to see if his relatives were there. Only when he recognized a cousin did he go ashore and walk up to the city, surrounded by an informal bodyguard.
With tears in his eyes, Alcibiades said what he could at the boulē and the ecclesia to explain his actions, but most people were more interested in a glittering future than in the past. A crown of gold was placed on his head and he was appointed commander-in-chief, as Xenophon put it, “on the grounds that he was the man to restore the former power of Athens.” The records of his trial and sentence were sunk in the sea, his property was returned, and the priests were ordered to recant their curse.
Since the Spartan occupation of Decelea, the annual procession from Athens to Eleusis to celebrate the Mysteries had had to travel by sea. This year Alcibiades led it along its traditional land route, escorted by troops. The Spartans did not react. It was a doubly symbolic gesture; it showed contempt for King Agis and his men and it gave Alcibiades an opportunity to show his reverence for the Mysteries, which he had been accused (falsely, he still claimed) of mocking. If ever there was a moment when he could establish himself as tyrant it was now, but perhaps he told himself that he would do better to win the war first.
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Two developments cast a shadow over Athenian prospects. An intelligent and energetic new Spartan admiral was appointed to the Peloponnesian fleet. This was Lysander. His family was poor and he was a mothax (literally Doric Greek for “stepbrother”), a term used for a Spartan who was too poor to pay for membership of a syssitia, or soldier’s mess, and was obliged to find a wealthy sponsor. Although not one of the Equals, a mothax was allowed to fight alongside them.
Lysander was an imperialist and wanted Sparta to replace Athens as leader of the Greek world. He made the acquaintance of Cyrus, brother of the Persian king Artaxerxes. He complained to the young prince that Tissaphernes was only halfhearted in his support for the Peloponnesian fleet and persuaded him to raise the subsidy for sailor’s pay from three obols a head to four. Artaxerxes appointed Cyrus to take over command of the war from Tissaphernes. He was in his late teens, hyperactive and resolutely pro-Spartan. Lysander could be arrogant and overbearing, but on this occasion he obeyed the rules of flattery and deference at court. The Spartan and the Persian became good friends.
At this inauspicious moment Alcibiades lost concentration. His enemies at home, who had been patiently waiting for an error they could exploit, pounced.
An Athenian fleet was standing off Ephesus near the port of Notium. Alcibiades wanted to bring Lysander and his fleet to battle as soon as possible, but they stayed where they were inside the harbor of Ephesus. The Spartan admiral, handsomely financed by Cyrus and able to afford higher wages than the Athenians, had time on his side and saw no reason to risk a fight. By contrast, Alcibiades was the victim of great expectations, for the Athenian public imagined he could achieve whatever he wanted. Also, tempted by Persian gold, his oarsmen were deserting to the enemy in some numbers.
Alcibiades sailed away in his troopships on a brief expedition to look for money and rations, leaving his triremes on guard against any move by Lysander. He placed his helmsman in charge of the fleet, a man called Antiochus, a good pilot but (according to Plutarch) an unthinking lowlife. He was well qualified as a drinking companion, but not as an admiral.
Alcibiades gave him strict instructions to avoid battle at all costs, but Antiochus ignored what he had been told. He sailed across Ephesus’s harbor mouth with a couple of triremes, shouting abuse and making obscene gestures. Lysander sent a few boats to chase him away, and gradually both fleets came out to fight. Antiochus was killed and the Athenians lost twenty-two ships. It was a minor but completely pointless setback. Alcibiades rushed back as soon as he heard the news and offered battle to Lysander, but the Spartan declined. He had done well enough as it was, and saw no need to take any more risks.
The skirmish at Notium was the first real reverse since Cyzicus, and the ecclesia was dismayed. A speaker blamed Alcibiades for appointing men “who had won his confidence simply through their capacity for drinking and telling sailors’ yarns.” He was treating the war at sea as if it were a luxury cruise. All his old misdeeds were rehearsed, the assistance he gave Sparta and his collusion with the Persians. He was dismissed from office.
It seems a foolish decision, the demos at its flightiest, but the debacle at Notium did no more than throw a harsh light onto a preexisting state of affairs—the divisiveness of Alcibiades. Feelings against him were too strong not to keep reemerging and he could not assemble a broad enough consensus of support in the long run. He knew that his return to Athens had been a huge and dangerous gamble. He saw at once that he had made his last throw of the dice and lost. He was no longer safe. He left the fleet for a castle in the Thracian Chersonese, a bolt-hole that he had prepared in advance exactly against this eventuality.
Irrepressible as ever, Alcibiades paid for some mercenaries and led a raiding party into Thrace, ransoming his captives for large sums of money. But this was child’s play to what he had lost.
Two years after the disgrace of Alcibiades, Aristophanes wrote in The Frogs of his fellow-citizens’ mixed feelings about their lost leader. Athens “longs for him, but hates him, and yet she wants to have him back.” But it was too late for that now.
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The demos continued on its angry, cruel, and unpredictable way.
Lysander’s commission expired after its statutory year in 406 and he was obliged to hand over to a new young commander, Callicratidas, who was that rare thing—a traditional Spartan with charm, who had something of the much-missed Brasidas about him. His predecessor was so annoyed at being superseded that he blackened Callicratidas’s reputation with Cyrus and gave back to the prince the unspent remainder of the subsidies he had provided.
The admiral disagreed with the expansionist policy of Lysander. He regarded the Persian alliance as a disgrace and was furious when Cyrus refused to meet him. On a visit to Miletus, an anti-Persian polis that he made the headquarters of his campaign, he told its general assembly: “It is a sad day for the Greeks when they have to flatter foreigners for cash. If I get home safely I will, to the best of my ability, make peace between Athens and Sparta.”
He raised the money he needed to pay for his huge fleet of 140 vessels from Ionian cities, who appreciated his distaste for the Persians. He hunted down the Athenian fleet, now led by an admiral called Conon, and caught it at the harbor mouth of Mytilene, the capital of the island of Lesbos. He captured thirty Athenian triremes, leaving Conon with not more than forty blockaded inside the port. If he had destroyed the entire fleet the war would have been over. Cyrus did not want to see Sparta victorious without Persian help and immediately sent Callicratidas money to pay the crews.