KEY DATES 

AD 527–65	Reign of Justinian
AD 533	Roman reconquest of North Africa from Vandals, followed by successful campaigns in Italy to 540 and the invasion of Visigothic Spain in 551
AD 540	Persians sack Antioch
AD 577	Beginning of Avar incursions into the Balkans
AD 568	Lombards invade Italy
AD 10-640	Reign of Heraclius. Romans lose Jerusalem (614) and Egypt (616) to Persians and on the defensive until Heraclius’ victory at Nineveh in 627
AD 622	Muhammad’s Flight to Medina. The first year of the Islamic calendar
AD 626	Constantinople under siege by Avars and Persians
AD 628	Roman peace with Persia
AD 636	Arab armies defeat Roman forces at Yarmuk. Jerusalem taken in 638, Egypt in 640, and Anatolia invaded in 647. The Persian Empire destroyed in 651
AD 671	Constantinople survives Arab blockade
AD 697	Arabs capture Carthage
AD 711	Arabs cross the Straits of Gibraltar, invading Visigothic Spain

XVII

THINGS FALL APART

Let the cities return to their former glory, and let nobody prefer the pleasures of the countryside to the monuments of the ancients. Why avoid in peacetime the very places we fought wars to protect? Who finds anything less welcome than the company of the elite? Who does not enjoy conversing with his equals, promenading in the forum, observing the practice of worthy professions, engaging in legal cases in the courts, or playing that game of draughts that Palamedes loved, or visiting the baths with one’s fellows, or inviting one another to grand banquets? Yet those who choose to spend all their time in the country with their slaves miss out on all of this.

(Cassiodorus, Variae 8.31.8)

How Empires End

Empires do not all have the same fate. Modern studies of collapse and transformation have failed to establish a single theory of imperial decay, offering instead a range of alternative catastrophes.Perhaps this should not surprise. Empires— even early ones—were complicated engines with many parts that might go wrong. The argument of this book has been that it is persistence and survival that needs to be explained, not decline and fall. Rome’s genius—or good fortune—lay in the ability to recover from crisis after crisis. Until this one.

Some empires succumb to sudden and unexpected violence from without. The empire of the Inka crumbled before the invasion of Pizarro, and the Achaemenid Persian Empire was swept away by Alexander. The rapidity of their fall often seems to follow as much from the demonstration of the fragility of their rulers’ claims to cosmological favour, as from any actual losses in manpower and resources that follow the first reverses. Emperors claim so much. When their weakness is exposed the disappointment is often fatal. Collapses of that sort illustrate how much early empires depended on ideology and symbolism to sustain them.

Other early empires simply fragmented, like the empire of Han China and the Abbasid caliphate. Fragmentation is arguably a risk integral to the structure of tributary empires. Most early empires were, after all, put together when a conqueror accumulated a series of pre-existing kingdoms: Achaemenid Persia and Qin China offer paradigms for this kind of growth. Earlier identities were rarely eroded under the relatively light touch of pre-industrial hegemony and capstone monarchy. Egyptians remembered their pharaohs under Persian, Macedonian, and Roman occupations. Greek writers looked back before Rome and Macedon to the classical age of Athens and Sparta. Even when the issue was not one of ancient traditions, these empires were often composed of separable parts. Tributary empires often simplified their logistics by allowing each region to support its own occupying army and governors. This, too, made individual regions potentially self-sufficient. Alexander’s empire collapsed because it depended on Macedonian armies supplied by local satrapal administration. Fragmentation usually began at the margins. Action at a distance is a problem for all emperors, and distance was exacerbated by primitive communications. A common response was to create powerful border viceroys, lords palatinate, margraves, and the like, with the authority and resources to respond independently to external threats. But when the centre did not hold these border generals often chose to go it alone. The outer satrapies of the Achaemenid and Seleucid empires were often in revolt. Fragmentation may be temporary, of course. Aurelian reunited the Roman Empire, and Antiochus III did the same for the Persian Empire. Chinese imperial history is often presented as an alternation of fragmentation and reintegration.

Yet other empires simply wither away. They lose control of their outer provinces to revolt or conquest, but successfully retrench to their original (or a new) core area. Often their rulers maintained the imperial styles and ceremonies of their grander pasts. Imperial Athens in the fourth century BC, late Hellenistic Syria and Egypt, the last century of Mughal rule in India all offer examples. After the Fourth Crusade resulted in the Frankish seizure of Byzantium in 1204 there remained tiny successor Greek empires in Epirus, Nicaea, and Trebizond. Historical sociologists have never found it easy to distinguish large states from small empires. Perhaps it is best to say that some empires have reverted to ordinary states with extraordinary memories.

During the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries AD, the Roman Empire underwent all three of these fates: invasion, fragmentation, and a dramatic downsizing. The empire was repeatedly invaded. how Alamanni, Vandals, Huns, and others followed the Gothic groups, who entered the empire in AD 376. The loss of the western provinces was not as rapid as the fall of the Inka or the Aztec. Yet within a hundred years of the battle of Adrianople, Rome’s Mediterranean empire was no more. There were further invasions during the sixth and seventh centuries. From the north the Avars and Slavs invaded the Balkan provinces and the Lombards Italy. Periodic Persian raids into Syria culminated in 540 in the sack of Antioch. Finally, in the early seventh century, the Arab conquests swept away Byzantine Africa, Egypt, Sicily, and Syria and went on in the next century to destroy Visigothic Spain.

The empire fragmented, too, in the sense that the political unity of the west came apart in stages, leaving intact for a while Roman tax systems, Roman cities, and the Latin-speaking elites who ran both. The fact that taxation was devolved via the praetorian prefectures to the groups of provinces known as dioceses certainly helped make fragmentation feasible. For some Romans in the west, perhaps only the identity of their rulers seemed to have changed.Theoderic the Ostrogoth held court in the imperial capital of Ravenna, celebrated games in the Roman Colosseum and Circus, and patronized the western Senate, even lending some support to efforts to restore the monuments of the city. The Roman senator Cassiodorus had a career at the Gothic court in Ravenna in the early sixth century first as quaestor, then as magister officiorum, and finally as praetorian prefect for Italy. These positions, part of the Ostrogothic inheritance from Rome, were among the most senior in the bureaucracy. Like senatorial courtiers of the fourth and fifth centuries, he also interrupted his career for a consulship in Rome. Cassiodorus produced elegant Latin literary works throughout his life, alongside the royal letters he was responsible for drafting. His panegyric of the barbarian king and his (lost) history of the Goths show how easy it was for educated Romans to accommodate themselves to new circumstances. At the end of his life, he founded a monastery and turned his attention to religious writing. Many of the earlier generation of kingdoms in the west—those of the Ostrogoths and Vandals and Burgundians for example—were in effect hybrid societies; Romans living by one set of laws and performing civil functions while the barbarian leaders lived by their different customs and provided the military. The exact means by which the barbarian ‘guests’ were supported is unclear. Did they own a share of the land? Or have a share of its profits? Perhaps different modes of accommodation were developed in different kingdoms.But it is clear that the kings stood at the head of these societies, tribal leaders and Roman magistrates combined, issuing law and distributing favours to all their subjects. The Visigothic kingdom in Spain preserved elements of this fusion until it was swept away by the Arab conquests in the early eighth century.

At Constantinople, too, some must have taken comfort in the fact that barbarian kings sometimes claimed to rule as subordinates of the emperor and put the eastern emperors’ heads on their coinage. But in practice those emperors had no influence over their appointment, or how they ruled. Mostly they had enough to worry about defending their territory against raids from across the Danube or war with Persia. But fragmentation had been reversed before, and it is not surprising that the eastern emperors did not immediately give up on the west. Most dramatic of all interventions were those of Justinian in the middle of the sixth century. Justinian ruled 527–65 and his reign is exceptionally well documented, most of all by the historical works of Procopius, who produced not only accounts of the emperor’s wars of reconquest and his building activities, but also of the intrigues at court.The great volume of legislation Justinian produced and had codified, and an account of the administration of the empire by one of his praetorian prefects, John the Lydian, together offer a vivid picture of the sixth-century empire.Justinian’s generals succeeded in recapturing North Africa from the Vandals in 533, gaining control of Sicily and much of Italy from the Ostrogoths by 540, and finally creating a beachhead in Visigothic Spain in 551. But the wars in Italy, which were prolonged until 561, exhausted the empire and made impossible the kind of cohabitation between Romans and Goths created by kings like Theoderic and senators like Cassiodorus. The reconquest of Italy was short-lived: in 568 the peninsula was invaded once again, this time by the Lombards.

Finally the empire collapsed back on itself, and retrenched, not on Rome, of course, but on Byzantium.Retrenchment did not only mean shrinkage: the fundamental economic and administrative structures of the empire were in the process remodelled. Even at the beginning of the eighth century, when everything south of Anatolia was lost, and Arab invaders were crossing into Spain; when the Lombards had swept away most of Justinian’s gains in Italy; and much of the Balkans was effectively outside the control of the emperors, Constantinople remained a spectacular city. But it was in some senses now the only real city in a miniature Christian empire stretched around the Aegean Sea. Its complex administrative and legal systems remained characteristically Roman long after Latin had disappeared from everyday usage, and the ceremonials and intrigues of the palace were as elaborate as ever. As the power of the Franks grew from the eighth century onwards, Byzantium was the only possible model for imitation, and the city still offered a fascinating spectacle to the descendants of western barbarians as late as the eleventh century, when crusading brought the societies into yet another relationship. The three heirs of Rome—as western Christendom, Islam, and Byzantium have been aptly called —were the products of fragmentation, invasion, and shrinkage. Each part had its own imperial destiny and dreams, but the story of Rome’s empire ends here.

Fig. 23. A mosaic portraying the Emperor Justinian from San Vitale, Ravenna

Continuities in the Long Term

The detailed political history of the sixth and seventh centuries does not offer an explanation of the end of the Roman Empire. Those who wrote that history—whether chroniclers of disasters like Zosimus, or ambivalent recorders of imperial success like Procopius—had no real sense of the big picture. Christian historiography told its own stories, in some of which political changes hardly signified: the Church marched on as earthly kingdoms came and went. Otherwise political history took the familiar Roman form of an alternation between more and less successful emperors. Social, economic, and other trends were almost invisible from their perspective on the ground. As a result, the successes of Justinian in the sixth century, the disasters of the reigns of Maurice and Phokas that followed, and the triumphs of Heraclius against the Persians in the early seventh century do not explain the structural transformation of the empire. I shall not try to summarize those narratives here.

During the course of this book, I have drawn attention to a number of contexts that made the success of the Roman Empire possible. The Mediterranean basin offered a corridor within which communication was relatively easy. The Sahara and the Atlantic together provided boundaries that, once reached, did not really need to be defended. The Iron Age civilizations of the Mediterranean world and its hinterlands produced sufficient demographic and agricultural surpluses to support the rise of cities and states, even given the technological limits of antiquity. Climatic conditions, broadly similar to those we experience today, had perhaps contributed to the general prosperity of the period, making it easier for peasant cultivators to produce the surpluses on which states and empires depended.

Little of this had changed by the seventh century AD. Plagues had occasionally ravaged the empire. Epidemics of different kinds had moved back and forward between the more densely populated (and so urbanized) portions of the Old World since at least the middle of the last millennium BC. But it is likely that this had been happening every so often since the first domestications of animals and the appearance of the first towns. The disease pools of Eurasia had been loosely connected by trade routes and urban systems from the Neolithic. Mediterranean plagues tended to come from the east, as Chinese ones did from the west. Literary sources—our only evidence—record terrifying epidemics in the reign of Marcus Aurelius, in the middle of the third century AD, and again in the reign of Justinian. But it is very difficult on the basis of contemporary testimony alone to assess either the severity of these episodes, or their long-term impact on the economy or on population levels. The question of climatic change is equally difficult. Even minor changes in the mean temperature can have dramatic impacts on the fertility of marginal areas. Sea level rises are recorded in late antiquity in some areas while dendro-chronological (tree-ring) data has been taken to suggest a slight drop in fertility. But it is difficult to make close connections between changes at this scale and historical questions, such as the relative success of the empire in resisting incoming groups in different periods. Few historians today subscribe to either an epidemiological or a climatic explanation for the collapse of Roman power, and few believe in a dramatic collapse in the population of the empire. But research is moving fast in these areas, and the balance of probabilities may well change.

If the external environment of the Roman Empire were broadly unchanged, then the crucial variables must lie among the institutions and routines out of which Roman rule had first been constructed and later sustained. I have emphasized the use made of the family, slavery, and the city; the community of interest engineered between local and imperial elites; and the power of ideological productions, including those associated with state cults, to capture the imagination of Rome’s other subjects. None of these had remained fossilized over the seven centuries that separated Polybius from Zosimus. But many features of Roman society remained recognizable.

Continuities are most clear at the lowest level of organization, the family and slavery, linked as ever to the primitive conditions of economic production on which the empire rested. Cassiodorus’ writings and the legislation of Justinian show us how vital some of these most basic building blocks of empire remained in the sixth century. Roman styles of family life were perhaps more widespread than ever before, disseminated by the spread of citizenship, the moderate extension of education in late antiquity, and the cultural convergence of the empire’s elites. Notions of slavery and the family that would have been recognizable to Cicero remained enshrined at the heart of Roman and barbarian law codes alike. Probably the numerical balance between slaves and free had shifted very slightly. But where records are good, as in late antique Egypt, there is no sign of a dramatic change in social structure. Transformation, rather than crisis, is the preferred term among scholars working on these subjects.

Fundamental change is much more evident at what we might term higher levels of organization, that is in relation to the city, local, and imperial elites and the government of the empire itself. The idea that collapse often occurs through the shedding of the highest levels of social complexity perhaps has some application here. At the highest level, the power and authority of the emperor, there was clearly enormous change as the empire fragmented, for all it was mystified by traditionalism and ritual.Roman scholars were, to some extent, able to reproduce their accustomed lifestyles in the chaos of Ostrogothic Italy or under the increasingly centralized power of Justinianic Constantinople. Rural lifestyles were least affected. But the picture looks different if we focus attention on that level of imperial society represented by cities, landowning elites, and the fiscal systems through which they had been linked ever since the Roman Empire was transformed from conquest state to tributary empire.

Cities and their Rulers

The early empire rested on a collusion of interests between the propertied classes of Rome and their counterparts in Italy and the provinces. Many of these elites were already installed within a world of city-states, whether of Greek, Punic, Etruscan, or other origin. Others were drawn into that mode of aristocracy, and shaped in their image. Across the western and northern provinces, in interior Spain and North Africa and Anatolia, in Syria and eventually even in Egypt, cities on the classical model were established. Those cities provided the emperors with their most fundamental instrument of government. The local property classes that ruled them kept order and collected taxes, and in return the empire preserved and enhanced their power over other members of their societies.

Today, Roman cities evoke images of temples and basilicas, theatres and bathhouses, grand amphitheatres and enormous circuses, the representative highlights of a monumentality that, with some variations, came to characterize the early Roman Empire wherever it could be afforded. Monuments of this kind represented a commitment—financial and moral—on the part of the rich to a particular urban version of civilization. That civilization included a public style of politics and social life, and a festival culture that alluded to the past, celebrated the present, and was designed to ensure the future.¹⁶ The remains of those monuments are the physical traces of urban societies, the hard fossils from which the ephemeral material of human life and public rhetoric has since withered away.

Sixth-century rulers were as spellbound as we are by these traces of urban civilization. But by their day, they were no more than traces in most parts of the empire. Almost all the great monuments of provincial cities were built before the middle of the third century AD: even maintaining them was a concern for rulers of all kinds. The letter quoted at the head of this chapter was penned by Cassiodorus for the Gothic king Athalaric who was keen to encourage the propertied classes to return to their notional urban bases. Procopius wrote a long account of Justinian’s building works, but when On Buildings is examined closely we see the emperor’s attention was focused almost exclusively on churches and fortifications. When he did found the city of Justiniana Prima at his birthplace in Thrace, it covered around 7 hectares (around 17 acres): early imperial cities often extended well over 100 hectares (just under 250 acres). Already in Italy and much of the west, the propertied classes had moved out to their grand estates hundreds of years before. Urban contraction was most dramatic in the northern provinces, where occupied areas dropped to a third by around AD 300: by the end of the fourth century some were no more than refuges, fortified strongpoints built out of pillaged monuments in the middle of vast deserted towns, in which abandoned residential quarters were gradually crumbling where they had not already been turned into gardens and fields.

That vision looks catastrophic to us. But in most areas the process of change was probably a gradual one and the product of choice not necessity. The wealthy had always had homes in both town and country, and over time they spent more time (and money) in the latter than in the former. Public building and the sponsoring of festivals in most cities dried up between AD 200 and 300. Meanwhile the villas of the fourth century display extravagant elaboration and ornamentation. Wherever the elites were absent from the cities, urban economies shrivelled up without the huge stimulus of their spending and that of their slaves, freedmen, and clients and without the support of their occasional benefactions.

Charting and explaining the collapse of classical urbanism has been a major research priority for archaeologists and for historians of late antiquity.One clear finding is that there were exceptions to this picture, but they are not where we might have expected them. Rome, for example, underwent dramatic population decline. Estimates for the age of Augustus are around one million, by the early fifth century it was about a third of that, and when Justinian’s armies recaptured it from the Gothic kings in 536 it was around 80,000. The decline set in far too early to be explained by the Gothic wars or even the fall of the west. On the other hand a small number of cities show evidence for building of private housing and extensive trade well into the fifth and sometimes the sixth centuries. Marseilles and Carthage, Ephesus, Alexandria, and Caesarea are particularly well studied: all were, as it happens, port cities. This pattern is superimposed on some broad regional variation that can be (crudely) summarized as follows. Britain, Germany, and northern Gaul experienced earlier and more severe urban contraction than anywhere else, while Syria and western Asia Minor seem to have sustained urban styles of life longest, with clear continuity in Syria into the period of Islamic rule. Spanish cities were transformed during the fourth century, insofar as Christian building replacing older monuments is concerned, but there is little third-century construction of public monuments. Many African cities do well into the fourth century and later, but others do not.Urbanism generally did not flourish in the Balkans, but in much of the interior cities had never been very large. Egypt had no catastrophic decline, but temple building declined from the third century, some time before churches begin to appear. Many classical cities had their afterlives, at least as places invested with memories. Many had been built on key sites in communication nodes; centuries of road building and port construction had only emphasized these advantages. Bishoprics were also based on the urban framework of the second century. Many towns survived to the Middle Ages only as wall circuits enclosing churches, and in a few cases the palaces of barbarian kings. Otherwise, the physical cities crumbled or were absorbed. Temples naturally found fewer sponsors after Constantine and some were physically dismantled, but many became churches. Aqueducts functioned for surprisingly long periods after the end of their construction. Shops, stalls, and markets encroached on the great colonnades and public squares of Syrian cities during the sixth century.

It is still difficult to sum up this picture, let alone explain it in a way that is completely satisfying. But a few trends can be separated out. First, the rich stopped building public monuments and endowing money virtually everywhere before the end of the third century: where new building is attested in the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries it generally comprises fortifications, churches, and private mansions. Second, even after elites had transferred their expenditure from public to private, they varied considerably from region to region in how far they chose to live in or near cities. Third, some impoverishment of part of the landowning classes is certain: at least some of this was due to increased burdens imposed by the state, at the same time as more members of local elites were able to escape financial obligations by joining the imperial bureaucracy or indeed the Church.Fourth, civic institutions collapsed despite efforts made by various emperors to compel local elites to maintain them: their role was taken over by imperial counts and governors, bishops, and groups of first citizens.²⁴ Fifth, notwithstanding these trends, a small number of port cities seem to have thrived connecting densely farmed landscapes, like those of Egypt, Syria, and North Africa, to distant consumers. Sixth, responsibility for these changes cannot be laid at the door of environmental change or any other external factor: the only plausible culprits are the propertied classes and the empire, and they were certainly not working together.

Empire, Aristocracy, and the Crisis

Not all empires relied on an urban infrastructure. Romans did not exactly choose this course: the Mediterranean urban system long pre-dated Rome’s rise to power, and structured the social and political space they expanded into. Even so, cities and civic elites only really became central to the running of the empire in the late Republic, after the shortcomings of other mechanisms—such as unequal alliances, client kings, tax farming, informal hegemony—had been revealed. Pompey and Caesar had laid the groundwork, and Augustus had generalized the system.

But since then the empire had experienced a combination of incremental and catastrophic changes. Incremental changes included the gradual expansion of bureaucracy; the development of the court as a governing institution in its own right; and the emergence within the propertied classes of a group of families of exceptional wealth. Catastrophic changes included the new monetary, fiscal, and governmental systems set up by Diocletian and Constantine. The bureaucracy run by the praetorian prefects and from the early fourth century by the magister officiorum (the same position that Cassiodorus had held at the court of Theodoric the Ostrogoth) was much larger than its early imperial counterpart, and it assumed fiscal, juridical, and organizational functions that had been performed before either by cities as institutions or by aristocrats in the imperial service. Unsurprisingly the emperors became less and less concerned to require members of the local elites—called curiales in the west and bouleutai in the east—to carry out their civic obligations if they would prefer to join the imperial service. Squeezed on the one hand by exemptions and on the other by wealth accumulation that reduced the number of families who could be asked to supply magistrates, some cities clearly ran into problems. Yet the fact that other cities seem to have survived and prospered shows this was less of a general threat and more of a possible hazard in the new order.

Attractive, then, as it might be to see Roman imperialism as a species of macro-parasitism,growing up within classical urban civilization before killing off its host (and so itself), that story is too simple. Not only does it not explain all the variation between the fates of different cities: it makes no sense of the length of the process by which some (but not all) of the rich fell out of love with city life. An alternative narrative sees those propertied classes as the parasites, using the empire to accumulate wealth and power, and then refusing to pay their dues, with the result that the peasantries became alienated and the emperors ran out of cash to protect the ancient world from the barbarians. Again this is too simplistic. If some elites were indeed efficient at accumulating wealth in a smaller and smaller number of hands, they were not completely immune from the tax system in the fourth century. It is also difficult to show the peasantries of the empire were generally more disaffected in late antiquity than at other times. Finally, careful reading of the letters of Sidonius, the history of Zosimus, the erudite researches of Cassiodorus, or the passionate apologetics of Augustine and Orosius makes it difficult to reduce the attitudes and motives of the educated and wealthy to such a crude calculation of financial interest.

So if cities were not essential to ancient empires, why should Rome not have reinvented itself as a non-urban empire? The bureaucracy created in the fourth century, combined with the army, could surely raise revenue and secure peace. In a sense, this is exactly what did happen from the seventh century on, in the remnant Byzantine lands left around the Aegean. Constantinople was the only real city left, others were abandoned or became tiny market towns, and the empire was divided into districts called themata within which a single official exercised both military and civilian authority, raising locally the resources needed by the troops he commanded. But this system was evidently created in the aftermath of collapse. Using the language of transformation to describe what happened to the Roman Empire between AD 300 and 700 is an evasion. Measured in terms of territory, population, influence, and military power there is no doubt at all about the fact of collapse. Ancients recognized this, and so should we.

Throughout this story of empire I have emphasized moments of survival. Episodes of expansion are not rare in world history, and nor are short-lived periods of hegemony. The exclusive club that Rome joined, however, is that small number of political entities that survived their own expansion, and were able to generate new institutions, ideologies, and habits. Successful empires are sustained by long-term relationships with other social entities with which they are in some senses symbiotic. The success of the Roman Empire rested on the synergies it engineered between imperialism and aristocracy; imperialism and slavery; imperialism and the family; imperialism and the city; and imperialism and civilization. Those relationships were not immutable: during the symbioses each set of partners modified the other. Yet they were not very unstable either. The Romans’ own list of ‘crises survived’ might include the Gallic sack, the Conflict of the Orders, Hannibal and Cannae, the Social War, the civil wars, and a string of tyrannical emperors up until the anarchy of the third century. I have emphasized a slightly different set of key moments in the evolution of the empire: but in each case a new set of institutions emerged. From the third century AD on there are signs that each successive version of empire was in some respects less successful than its predecessors. During late antiquity the symbioses with the classical city and with the propertied classes grew weaker. That only mattered because what replaced them did not work so well.

Emperors seem to have realized this, since the pace of innovation did not let up. Attempts were made to remodel the aristocracies of the empire, making them more pliable and more useful. New titles were devised for senior courtiers, the Senate of Constantinople was treated with respect, and great ceremonies were orchestrated to draw in the masses. Positions were opened up in the imperial bureaucracy, and then actually sold to those who could afford them. Once in office, bureaucrats were allowed to charge bribes worth many times their notional salaries. Justinian tried to rally his subjects around a Christian faith; and worked as hard as Constantine had to unify that faith. He emphasized a single legal system, and with it traditional moral and martial values. His reconquest of the west and his great campaigns of church building won support. But an ideology that required constant success was no support when times were hard. Military failures and payments to the barbarians undermined the reputations of some emperors. Christianity was a less effective imperial ideology than had been the traditional state cults, partly because of the chronic tendency to schism and heresy, partly because it conferred an independent authority on religious leaders, such as the bishops of Rome. During the sixth century one could be a Christian without being a subject of the emperor, and a Roman living under a barbarian king. Justinian was not welcomed with open arms throughout the west, and even at the end of what was by most standards a phenomenally successful reign, he was dogged by religious divisions

FINAL SOLUTION

Hitler’s utopias crumbled upon contact with the Soviet Union, but they were refashioned rather than rejected. He was the Leader, and his henchmen owed their positions to their ability to divine and realize his will. When that will met resistance, as on the eastern front in the second half of 1941, the task of men such as Göring, Himmler, and Heydrich was to rearrange Hitler’s ideas such that Hitler’s genius was affirmed—along with their own positions in the Nazi regime. The utopias in summer 1941 had been four: a lightning victory that would destroy the Soviet Union in weeks; a Hunger Plan that would starve thirty million people in months; a Final Solution that would eliminate European Jews after the war; and a Generalplan Ost that would make of the western Soviet Union a German colony. Six months after Operation Barbarossa was launched, Hitler had reformulated the war aims such that the physical extermination of the Jews became the priority. By then, his closest associates had taken the ideological and administrative initiatives necessary to realize such a wish.

No lightning victory came. Although millions of Soviet citizens were starved, the Hunger Plan proved impossible. Generalplan Ost, or any variant of postwar colonization plans, would have to wait. As these utopias waned, political futures depended upon the extraction of what was feasible from the fantasies. Göring, Himmler, and Heydrich scrambled amidst the moving ruins, claiming what they could. Göring, charged with economics and the Hunger Plan, fared worst. Regarded as “the second man in the Reich” and as Hitler’s successor, Göring remained immensely prominent in Germany, but played an ever smaller role in the East. As economics became less a matter of grand planning for the postwar period and more a matter of improvising to continue the war, Göring lost his leading position to Albert Speer. Unlike Göring, Heydrich and Himmler were able to turn the unfavorable battlefield situation to their advantage, by reformulating the Final Solution so that it could be carried out during a war that was not going according to plan. They understood that the war was becoming, as Hitler began to say in August 1941, a “war against the Jews.”

Himmler and Heydrich saw the elimination of the Jews as their task. On 31 July 1941 Heydrich secured the formal authority from Göring to formulate the Final Solution. This still involved the coordination of prior deportation schemes with Heydrich’s plan of working the Jews to death in the conquered Soviet East. By November 1941, when Heydrich tried to schedule a meeting at Wannsee to coordinate the Final Solution, he still had such a vision in mind. Jews who could not work would be made to disappear. Jews capable of physical labor would work somewhere in the conquered Soviet Union until they died. Heydrich represented a broad consensus in the German government, though his was not an especially timely plan. The Ministry for the East, which oversaw the civilian occupation authorities established in September, took for granted that the Jews would disappear. Its head, Alfred Rosenberg, spoke in November of the “biological eradication of Jewry in Europe.” This would be achieved by sending the Jews across the Ural Mountains, Europe’s eastern boundary. But by November 1941 a certain vagueness had descended upon Heydrich’s vision of enslavement and deportation, since Germany had not destroyed the Soviet Union and Stalin still controlled the vast majority of its territory.





While Heydrich made bureaucratic arrangements in Berlin, it was Himmler who most ably extracted the practical and the prestigious from Hitler’s utopian thinking. From the Hunger Plan he took the categories of surplus populations and useless eaters, and would offer the Jews as the people from whom calories could be spared. From the lightning victory he extracted the four Einsatzgruppen. Their task had been to kill Soviet elites in order to hasten the Soviet collapse. Their first mission had not been to kill all Jews as such. The Einsatzgruppen had no such order when the invasion began, and their numbers were too small. But they had experience killing civilians, and they could find local help, and they could be reinforced. From Generalplan Ost, Himmler extracted the battalions of Order Police and thousands of local collaborators, whose preliminary assignment was to help control the conquered Soviet Union. Instead they provided the manpower that allowed the Germans to carry out truly massive shootings of Jews beginning in August 1941. These institutions, supported by the Wehrmacht and its Field Police, allowed the Germans to murder about a million Jews east of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line by the end of the year.

Himmler succeeded because he grasped extremes of the Nazi utopias that operated within Hitler’s mind, even as Hitler’s will faced the most determined resistance from the world outside. Himmler made the Final Solution more radical, by bringing it forward from the postwar period to the war itself, and by showing (after the failure of four previous deportation schemes) how it could be achieved: by the mass shooting of Jewish civilians. His prestige suffered little from the failures of the lightning victory and the Hunger Plan, which were the responsibility of the Wehrmacht and the economic authorities. Even as he moved the Final Solution into the realm of the realizable, he still nurtured the dream of the Generalplan Ost, Hitler’s “Garden of Eden.” He continued to order revisions of the plan, and arranged an experimental deportation in the Lublin district of the General Government, and would, as opportunities presented themselves, urge Hitler to raze cities.

In the summer and autumn of 1941, Himmler ignored what was impossible, pondered what was most glorious, and did what could be done: kill the Jews east of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line, in occupied eastern Poland, the Baltic States, and the Soviet Union. Aided by this realization of Nazi doctrine during the months when German power was challenged, Himmler and the SS would come to overshadow civilian and military authorities in the occupied Soviet Union, and in the German empire. As Himmler put it, “the East belongs to the SS.”

The East, until very recently, had belonged to the NKVD. One secret of Himmler’s success was that he was able to exploit the legacy of Soviet power in the places where it had most recently been installed.

In the first lands that German soldiers reached in Operation Barbarossa, they were the war’s second occupier. The first German gains in summer 1941 were the territories Germans had granted to the Soviets by the Treaty on Borders and Friendship of September 1939: what had been eastern Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, annexed in the meantime to the Soviet Union. In other words, in Operation Barbarossa German troops first entered lands that had been independent states through 1939 or 1940, and only then entered the prewar Soviet Union. Their Romanian ally meanwhile conquered the territories that it had lost to the Soviet Union in 1940.

The double occupation, first Soviet, then German, made the experience of the inhabitants of these lands all the more complicated and dangerous. A single occupation can fracture a society for generations; double occupation is even more painful and divisive. It created risks and temptations that were unknown in the West. The departure of one foreign ruler meant nothing more than the arrival of another. When foreign troops left, people had to reckon not with peace but with the policies of the next occupier. They had to deal with the consequences of their own previous commitments under one occupier when the next one came; or make choices under one occupation while anticipating another. For different groups, these alternations could have different meanings. Gentile Lithuanians (for example) could experience the departure of the Soviets in 1941 as a liberation; Jews could not see the arrival of the Germans that way.

Lithuania had already undergone two major transformations by the time that German troops arrived in late June 1941. Lithuania, while still an independent state, had appeared to benefit from the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939. The Treaty on Borders and Friendship of September 1939 had granted Lithuania to the Soviets, but Lithuanians had no way of knowing that. What the Lithuanian leadership perceived that month was something else: Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union destroyed Poland, which throughout the interwar period had been Lithuania’s adversary. The Lithuanian government had considered Vilnius, a city in interwar Poland, as its capital. Lithuania, without taking part in any hostilities in September 1939, gained Polish lands for itself. In October 1939, the Soviet Union granted Lithuania Vilnius and the surrounding regions (2,750 square miles, 457,500 people). The price of Vilnius and other formerly Polish territories was basing rights for Soviet soldiers.

Then, just half a year after Lithuania had been enlarged thanks to Stalin, it was conquered by its seeming Soviet benefactor. In June 1940 Stalin seized control of Lithuania and the other Baltic States, Latvia and Estonia, and hastily incorporated them into the Soviet Union. After this annexation, the Soviet Union deported about twenty-one thousand people from Lithuania, including many Lithuanian elites. A Lithuanian prime minister and a Lithuanian foreign minister were among the exiled thousands. Some Lithuanian political and military leaders escaped the Gulag by fleeing to Germany. These were often people with some prior connections in Berlin, and always people embittered by their experience with Soviet aggression. The Germans favored the right-wing nationalists among the Lithuanian émigrés, and trained some of them to take part in the invasion of the Soviet Union.

Thus when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Lithuania occupied a unique position. It had profited from the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact; then it had been conquered by the Soviets; now it would be occupied by the Germans. After the ruthless year of Soviet occupation, many Lithuanians welcomed this change; few Lithuanian Jews were among them. Two hundred thousand Jews lived in Lithuania in June 1941 (about the same number as in Germany). The Germans arrived in Lithuania with their handpicked nationalist Lithuanians and encountered local people who were willing to believe, or to act as if they believed, that Jews were responsible for Soviet repressions. The Soviet deportations had taken place that very month, and the NKVD had shot Lithuanians in prisons just a few days before the Germans arrived. The Lithuanian diplomat Kazys Škirpa, who returned with the Germans, used this suffering in his radio broadcasts to spur mobs to murder. Some 2,500 Jews were killed by Lithuanians in bloody pogroms in early July.

As a result of trained collaboration and local assistance, German killers had all the help that they needed in Lithuania. The initial guidelines for killing Jews in certain positions were quickly exceeded by Einsatzgruppe A and the local collaborators it enlisted. Einsatzgruppe A had followed Army Group North into Lithuania. Einsatzkommando 3 of Einsatzgruppe A, responsible for the major Lithuanian city of Kaunas, had as many helpers as it needed. Einsatzkommando 3 numbered only 139 personnel, including secretaries and drivers, of which there were forty-four. In the weeks and months to come, Germans drove Lithuanians to killing sites around the city of Kaunas. By 4 July 1941 Lithuanian units were killing Jews under German supervision and orders. As early as 1 December Einsatzkommando 2 considered the Jewish problem in Lithuania resolved. It could report the killing of 133,346 persons, of whom some 114,856 were Jews. Despite Škirpa’s wishes, none of this served any Lithuanian political purpose. After he tried to declare an independent Lithuanian state, he was placed under house arrest.

The city of Vilnius had been the northeastern metropolitan center of independent Poland and briefly the capital of independent and Soviet Lithuania. But throughout all of these vicissitudes, and indeed for the previous half-millennium, Vilnius had been something else: a center of Jewish civilization, known as the Jerusalem of the North. Some seventy thousand Jews lived in the city when the war began. Whereas the rest of Lithuania and the other Baltic States were covered by Einsatzgruppe A, the Vilnius area (along with Soviet Belarus) fell to Einsatzgruppe B. The unit assigned to kill the Vilnius Jews was its Einsatzkommando 9. Here the shooting took place at the Ponary Forest, just beyond the city. By 23 July 1941 the Germans had assembled a Lithuanian auxiliary, which marched columns of Jews to Ponary. There, groups of twelve to twenty people at a time were taken to the edge of a pit, where they had to hand over valuables and clothes. Their gold teeth were removed by force. Some 72,000 Jews from Vilnius and elsewhere (and about eight thousand non-Jewish Poles and Lithuanians) were shot at Ponary.

Ita Straż was one of the very few survivors among the Jews of Vilnius. She was pulled by Lithuanian policemen to a pit that was already full of corpses. Nineteen years old at the time, she thought: “This is the end. And what have I seen of life?” The shots missed her, but she fell from fear into the pit. She was then covered by the corpses of the people who came after. Someone marched over the pile and fired downward, to make sure that everyone was dead. A bullet hit her hand, but she made no sound. She crept away later: “I was barefoot. I walked and walked over corpses. There seemed to be no end to it.”13

Neighboring Latvia, too, had been annexed by the Soviet Union just one year before the German invasion. Some twenty-one thousand Latvian citizens (many of them Latvian Jews) were deported by the Soviets, just weeks before the Germans arrived. The NKVD shot Latvian prisoners as the Wehrmacht approached Riga. The Germans’ main collaborator here was Viktor Arajs, a Latvian nationalist (German on his mother’s side) who happened to know the translator that German police forces brought to Riga. He was allowed to form the Arajs Commando, which in early July 1941 burned Jews alive in a Riga synagogue. As the Germans organized mass killings, they took care to choose Latvian shooters from among those whose families had suffered under Soviet rule. In July, under the supervision of Einsatzgruppe A commanders, the Arajs Commando marched Riga Jews to the nearby Bikernieki Forest and shot them. The Germans first carried out a “demonstration shooting,” and then had the Arajs Commando do much of the rest. With the assistance of such Latvians, the Germans were able to kill at least 69,750 of the country’s 80,000 Jews by the end of 1941.

In the third Baltic State, Estonia, the sense of humiliation after the Soviet occupation was just as great as in Lithuania and Latvia, if not greater. Unlike Vilnius and Riga, Tallinn had not even partially mobilized its army before surrendering to the Soviets in 1940. It had yielded to Soviet demands before the other Baltic States, thus precluding any sort of Baltic diplomatic solidarity. The Soviets had deported some 11,200 Estonians, including most of the political leadership. In Estonia, too, Einsatzgruppe A found more than enough local collaborators. Estonians who had resisted the Soviets in the forests now joined a Self-Defense Commando under the guidance of the Germans. Estonians who had collaborated with the Soviets also joined, in an effort to restore their reputations.

Estonians greeted the Germans as liberators, and in return the Germans regarded Estonians as racially superior not only to the Jews but to the other Baltic peoples. Jews in Estonia were very few. Estonians from the Self-Defense Commando killed all 963 Estonian Jews who could be found, at German orders. In Estonia the murders and pogroms continued without the Jews. About five thousand non-Jewish Estonians were killed for their ostensible collaboration with the Soviet regime.

East of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line, the Germans encountered the fresh traces of Soviet statebuilding as they began to build their own empire. The signs were even starker in what had been eastern Poland than in the Baltics. Whereas Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania had been incorporated by the Soviet Union a year before the German invasion, in June 1940, eastern Poland had been annexed by the Soviets nine months before that, in September 1939. Here the Germans found evidence of a social transformation. Industry had been nationalized, some farms had been collectivized, and a native elite had been all but destroyed. The Soviets had deported more than three hundred thousand Polish citizens and shot tens of thousands more. The German invasion prompted the NKVD to shoot some 9,817 imprisoned Polish citizens rather than allow them to fall into German hands. The Germans arrived in the western Soviet Union in summer 1941 to find NKVD prisons full of fresh corpses. These had to be cleared out before the Germans could use them for their own purposes.

Soviet mass murder provided the Germans with an occasion for propaganda. The Nazi line was that suffering under the Soviets was the fault of the Jews, and it found some resonance. With or without German agitation, many people in interwar Europe associated the Jews with communism. Interwar communist parties had in fact been heavily Jewish, especially in their leaderships, a fact upon which much of the press throughout Europe had commented for twenty years. Right-wing parties confused the issue by arguing that since many communists were Jews therefore many Jews were communists. These are very different propositions; the latter one was never true anywhere. Jews were blamed even before the war for the failings of national states; after the war began and national states collapsed during the Soviet or German invasion, the temptation for such scapegoating was all the greater. Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, and Poles had lost not only the independent states made for their nations but their status and local authority. They had surrendered all of this, in many cases, without putting up much of a fight. Nazi propaganda thus had a double appeal: it was no shame to lose to the Soviet communists, since they were backed by a powerful worldwide Jewish conspiracy; but since the Jews were ultimately to blame for communism, it was right to kill them now.

In an arc that extended southward from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea, the last week of June and the first weeks of July 1941 brought violence against Jews. In Lithuania and Latvia, where the Germans could bring local nationalists with them, and could pose at least for a moment as a liberator of whole states, the resonance of propaganda was greater and local participation more notable. In some important places in what had been eastern Poland, such as Białystok, the Germans carried out large-scale killings with their own forces, thereby setting a kind of example. Białystok, just east of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line, had been a city in northeastern Poland, then in Soviet Belarus. Immediately after it was taken by the Wehrmacht on 27 June, Order Police Battalion 309 began to plunder and kill civilians. German policemen killed about three hundred Jews and left the bodies lying around the city. Then they drove several hundred more Jews into the synagogue and set it on fire, shooting those who tried to escape. In the two weeks that followed, local Poles took part in some thirty pogroms in the Białystok region. Meanwhile, Himmler journeyed to Białystok, where he gave instructions that Jews were to be treated as partisans. The Order Police took a thousand Jewish men from Białystok to its outskirts and shot them between 8 and 11 July.18

Further south in what had been eastern Poland, in regions where Ukrainians were a majority, Germans appealed to Ukrainian nationalism. Here the Germans blamed the Jews for Soviet oppression of Ukrainians. In Kremenets, where more than a hundred prisoners were found murdered, some 130 Jews were killed in a pogrom. In Lutsk, where some 2,800 prisoners were found machine-gunned, the Germans killed two thousand Jews, and called this revenge for the wrongs done to Ukrainians by Jewish communists. In Lviv, where about 2,500 prisoners were found dead in the NKVD prison, Einsatzgruppe C and local militia organized a pogrom that lasted for days. The Germans presented these people as Ukrainian victims of Jewish secret policemen: in fact, some of the victims were Poles and Jews (and most of the secret policemen were probably Russians and Ukrainians). The diary of a man belonging to another of the Einsatzgruppen recorded the scene on 5 July 1941: “Hundreds of Jews are running down the street with faces covered with blood, holes in their heads, and eyes hanging out.” In the first few days of the war, local militias, with and without various kinds of German aid and encouragement, killed and instigated others to kill about 19,655 Jews in pogroms.

Political calculation and local suffering do not entirely explain the participation in these pogroms. Violence against Jews served to bring the Germans and elements of the local non-Jewish population closer together. Anger was directed, as the Germans wished, toward the Jews, rather than against collaborators with the Soviet regime as such. People who reacted to the Germans’ urging knew that they were pleasing their new masters, whether or not they believed that the Jews were responsible for their own woes. By their actions they were confirming the Nazi worldview. The act of killing Jews as revenge for NKVD executions confirmed the Nazi understanding of the Soviet Union as a Jewish state. Violence against Jews also allowed local Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Poles who had themselves cooperated with the Soviet regime to escape any such taint. The idea that only Jews served communists was convenient not just for the occupiers but for some of the occupied as well.

Yet this psychic nazification would have been much more difficult without the palpable evidence of Soviet atrocities. The pogroms took place where the Soviets had recently arrived and where Soviet power was recently installed, where for the previous months Soviet organs of coercion had organized arrests, executions, and deportations. They were a joint production, a Nazi edition of a Soviet text.

The encounter with Soviet violence east of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line served the SS, and its leaders. Himmler and Heydrich had always maintained that life was a clash of ideologies, and that traditional European understandings of the rule of law had to give way to the ruthless violence needed to destroy the racial and ideological enemy in the East. The traditional enforcers of German law, the police, had to become “ideological soldiers.” Thus before the war Himmler and Heydrich had purged the ranks of the police of men deemed unreliable, encouraged policemen to join the SS, and placed the SS and the Security Police (Order Police plus Gestapo) under a single structure of command. Their goal was to create a unified force dedicated to preemptive racial warfare. By the time of the invasion of the Soviet Union, about a third of German policemen with officer rank belonged to the SS, and about two thirds belonged to the National Socialist party.

The German surprise attack had caught the NKVD off guard, and made the East appear to be a domain of lawlessness primed for a new German order. The NKVD, usually discreet, had been revealed as the murderer of prisoners. Germans broke through the levels of mystification, secrecy, and dissimulation that had covered the (far greater) Soviet crimes of 1937-1938 and 1930-1933. The Germans (along with their allies) were the only power ever to penetrate the territory of the Soviet Union in this way, and so the only people in a position to present such direct evidence of Stalinist murder. Because it was the Germans who discovered these crimes, the prison murders were politics before they were history. Fact used as propaganda is all but impossible to disentangle from the politics of its original transmission.

Because of the visible record of Soviet violence, German forces of order could present themselves as undoing Soviet crimes even as they engaged in crimes of their own. In light of their indoctrination, what Germans found in the doubly occupied lands made a certain kind of sense to them. It seemed to be a confirmation of what they had been trained and prepared to see: Soviet criminality, supposedly steered by and for the benefit of Jews. Soviet atrocities would help German SS-men, policemen, and soldiers justify to themselves the policies to which they were soon summoned: the murder of Jewish women and children. Yet the prison shootings, significant as they were to the local people who suffered Soviet criminality, were for Nazi leaders rather catalyst than cause.

In July 1941, Himmler was eager to show his master Hitler that he was attuned to the darker side of National Socialism, and ready to pursue policies of absolute ruthlessness. His SS and police were in competition for authority in the new eastern colonies with military and civilian occupation authorities. He was also in a personal contest for Hitler’s favor with Göring, whose plans for economic expansion lost credibility as the war preceded. Himmler would demonstrate that shooting was easier than starvation, deportation, and slavery. As Reich Commissar for the Strengthening of Germandom, Himmler’s authority as chief of racial affairs extended only to conquered Poland, not to the conquered Soviet Union. But as German forces moved into the prewar Soviet Union, Himmler behaved as if it did, using his power as head of the police and the SS to begin a policy of racial transformation that depended upon mortal violence.

In July 1941, Himmler traveled personally throughout the western Soviet Union to pass on the new line: Jewish women and children should be killed along with Jewish men. The forces on the ground reacted immediately. Einsatzgruppe C, which had followed Army Group South into Ukraine, had been slower than Einsatzgruppe A (the Baltic States) and Einsatzgruppe B (Vilnius and Belarus) to undertake mass shootings of Jews as such. But then, at Himmler’s instigation, Einsatzgruppe C killed some sixty thousand Jews in August and September. These were organized shootings, not pogroms. Indeed, Einsatzkommando 5 of Einsatzgruppe C complained on 21 July that a pogrom by local Ukrainians and German soldiers hindered them from shooting the Jews of Uman. In the next two days, however, Einsatzkommando  did shoot about 1,400 Uman Jews (sparing a few Jewish women who were to take gravestones from the Jewish cemetery and use them to build a road). Einsatzkommando  of Einsatzgruppe C seems not to have killed women and children until a personal inspection by Himmler.

Excerpt:

Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin

 

ALCIBIADES

[c.45O–404 B.C.]

TRADITION has it that Alcibiades’ family was founded by Eurysaces, the son of Ajax. His mother was Deinomache, the daughter of Megacles, and on her side he was descended from the house of Alcmaeon. His father Cleinias fitted out a warship at his own expense and fought brilliantly in the sea battle at Artemisium. He was later killed at Coronea in Tolmides’ ill-fated campaign against the Boeotians, and Alcibiades was brought up as the ward of Xanthippus’s two sons, Pericles and Ariphron, who were closely related to him.

It has been justly remarked that Alcibiades’ fame owes a great deal to the kindness and friendship shown him by Socrates. For example Nicias, Demosthenes, Lamachus, Phormio, Thrasybulus, and Theramenes were all famous men in Alcibiades’ time, and yet we do not so much as know the name of the mother of any of them, while in Alcibiades’ case we even know that his nurse was a Spartan woman called Amycla and his tutor was Zopyrus. The first of these details has been recorded by Antisthenes and the second by Plato.⁴

As for Alcibiades’ physical beauty, we need say no more than that it flowered at each season of his growth in turn, and lent him an extraordinary grace and charm, alike as a boy, a youth, and a man. Euripides’ saying that even the autumn of beauty possesses a loveliness of its own is not universally true. But if it applies to few others, it was certainly true of Alcibiades on account of his natural gifts and his physical perfection. Even his lisp is said to have suited his voice well and to have made his talk persuasive and full of charm. Aristophanes refers to it in the passage where he mocks Theorus, whose name was a byword for cowardice:

Sosias: Then Alcibiades said to me with that lisp of his ‘

Look at Theowus, what a cwaven’s head he has.’

Xanthias: He never lisped a truer word than that.

And Archippus, when he makes fun of Alcibiades’ son, says, ‘He goes mincing along, trailing his long robe behind him, trying to look the image of his father’, and again, ‘He tilts his head to one side and overdoes his lisp.’

2. In later life Alcibiades’ character was to reveal many changes and inconsistencies, as one might expect in a career such as his, which was spent in the midst of great enterprises and shifts of fortune. He was a man of many strong passions, but none of them was stronger than the desire to challenge others and gain the upper hand over his rivals. This is illustrated well enough by the stories which are told of his boyhood.

Once, when he was hard pressed in wrestling, rather than allow himself to be thrown, he set his teeth in his opponent’s arms as they gripped him and held on so hard he would have bitten through them. The other let go his hold and cried out, ‘Alcibiades, you bite like a woman!’ ‘No, like a lion,’ was his reply.

On another occasion, while he was still a small boy, he was playing knucklebones in the narrow street, and just when his turn came to throw, a loaded waggon was passing. First of all he ordered the driver to stop, as his dice had fallen right in the path of the dray, but the driver stolidly took no notice and urged on his horses. The other boys then scattered out of the way, but Alcibiades flung himself down on his face directly in front of the team, stretched out at full length and told the man to drive on if he wanted to. Upon this the driver took fright and reined in his horses, and the spectators were seized with panic, too, and ran up shouting to help the boy.

When he came to study, he was fairly obedient to most of his teachers, but refused to learn the flute, which he regarded as an ignoble accomplishment and quite unsuitable for a free citizen. He argued that to use a plectrum and play the lyre does not disfigure a gentleman’s bearing or appearance, but once a man starts blowing into a flute, his own friends can scarcely recognize his features. Besides, the lyre accompanies and creates a harmony for the words or the song of its performer, but the flute seals and barricades his mouth and deprives him both of voice and of speech. ‘Leave the flute to the sons of Thebes,’ he concluded, ‘for they have no idea of conversation. We Athenians, as our fathers say, have Athena for our foundress and Apollo for our patron, one of whom threw away the flute in disgust, while the other stripped the skin off the man who played it!’¹ In this way, half in jest and half in earnest, he not only avoided learning the instrument himself, but induced the other boys to do the same. The word soon went round that Alcibiades detested flute-playing and made fun of everybody who learned it, and with good reason, too. In consequence the flute disappeared from the number of so-called liberal accomplishments and came to be utterly despised.

3. When Alcibiades was a boy, according to one of the malicious stories which Antiphon has circulated, he ran away from home to Democrates, one of his admirers, whereupon his guardian Ariphron wanted to have it proclaimed by the town-crier that he had disappeared. But Pericles refused. ‘If he is dead,’ he said, ‘we shall only know the news a day sooner, and if he is alive it will be a reproach to him for the rest of his life.’ Antiphon also alleges that Alcibiades killed one of his attendants by striking him with a club at Sibyrtius’s wrestling school. However we need not give any credit to these stories, coming as they do from a man who has openly admitted that he abuses Alcibiades out of personal dislike.

4. It was not long before Alcibiades was surrounded and pursued by many admirers of high rank. Most of them were plainly captivated by the brilliance of his youthful beauty and courted him on this account. But it was the love which Socrates bore him which gave the strongest proof of the boy’s natural virtue and goodness of disposition. He saw that these qualities were innate in Alcibiades, as well as being radiantly embodied in his physical appearance. At the same time he feared the influence upon him, not merely of wealth and rank, but of the crowd of Athenians, foreigners, and men from the allied cities, who vied for his affections with flatteries and favours, and he therefore took it upon himself to protect Alcibiades and ensure that the fruit of such a fine plant should not be spoiled and wasted while it was still in flower. No man is so surrounded and lapped about by fortune with the so-called good things of life that he is completely out of reach of philosophy, or cannot be stung by its mordant and outspoken questions, and so it proved with Alcibiades. Even though he was pampered from the very beginning by companions who would say nothing but what they thought would please him, and hindered from listening to anybody who would advise or discipline him, yet because of his innate virtues, he recognized Socrates’ worth, attached himself to him, and rejected his rich and famous lovers. Soon, as he came to know Socrates and listened to the words of a lover who neither pursued unmanly pleasures nor asked for kisses and embraces, but constantly sought to point out his weaknesses and put down his empty and foolish conceit:

The cock crouched down like a slave
And let its feathers droop.

And he came to the conclusion that the role Socrates played was really part of a divine dispensation to watch over and rescue the young. In this way by disparaging himself, admiring his friend, loving that friend’s kindness towards him and revering his virtues, he unconsciously formed what Plato calls¹ ‘an image of love to match love’. Everyone was amazed to see him taking his meals and his exercise with Socrates and sharing his tent,² while he remained harsh and unaccommodating towards the rest of his lovers. Some of them, in fact, he treated with the greatest insolence, as happened in the case of Anytus, the son of Anthemion.

This man, who was one of Alcibiades’ admirers, was entertaining some guests to dinner and invited Alcibiades among them. Alcibiades refused the invitation, but that night he got drunk at home with a number of his friends and led a riotous procession to Anytus’s house. He stood at the door of the room in which the guests were being entertained, and there he noticed a great many gold and silver cups on the tables. He told his slaves to take half of these and carry them home for him; then he went off to his own house, without even deigning to enter the room. The guests were furious and declared that he had insulted Anytus outrageously. ‘On the contrary, I think he has behaved quite reasonably, you might even say considerately,’ was Anytus’s comment. ‘He could have taken everything; but at least he has left us half.’

5. This was how he treated the rest of his lovers. But there was one exception, a man who was a resident alien, as they were called. He was by no means rich, but he sold everything he possessed, brought the hundred staters he had got for his property to Alcibiades and begged him to accept them. Alcibiades was delighted at this, burst out laughing, and invited him to dinner. After entertaining him and showing him every hospitality, he gave him back the money and told him that the next day he must go to the market, where the public revenues were put up for auction, and outbid the speculators. The man protested, because a bid required a capital sum of many talents, but Alcibiades threatened to have him beaten if he did not agree, for he evidently had some private grudge against the tax-farmers. So next morning the alien went to the public auction and bid a talent higher than the usual figure for the public revenues. Upon this, the tax-farmers crowded around him angrily and demanded that he should name his guarantor, expecting that he would be unable to find one. The man was thrown into confusion and was on the point of backing out, when Alcibiades, standing in the distance, called out to the magistrates, ‘You can put my name down, he is a friend of mine: I guarantee him.’ When the contractors heard this, they were at their wits’ end, as their usual practice was to pay the amount due for the current year out of the profits of the preceding one. They could see no way out, and so they began to press the man to withdraw his bid and offered him money to do so, but Alcibiades would not allow him to accept less than a talent. As soon as they offered that amount he told him to take it and withdraw. This was the service that Alcibiades did him.

6. Socrates’ love for him had many powerful rivals, and yet because of Alcibiades’ innate good qualities it somehow prevailed over all other attachments, so that his teacher’s words took hold of him, wrung his heart, and moved him to tears. But there were times when he would surrender himself to his flatterers, who promised him all kinds of pleasures, and he would give Socrates the slip and then allow himself actually to be hunted down by him like a runaway slave. It was Socrates alone whom he feared and respected; all the rest of his lovers he despised.

Cleanthes the philosopher once remarked that anybody whom he loved must be ‘thrown’, as a wrestler would say, by means of words alone, though rival lovers might be allowed other holds, which he himself would scorn to use, meaning by this the various lusts of the body. Certainly Alcibiades was carefree and easily led into pleasure; that lawless self-indulgence in his daily life, which Thucydides mentions,¹ gives reason to suspect this. But the weakness which his tempters played upon most of all was his love of distinction and his desire for fame, and in this way they pressed him into embarking on ambitious projects before he was ready for them; they assured him that once he entered public life he would not merely eclipse the other generals and politicians, but even surpass the power and prestige which Pericles had enjoyed in the eyes of the Greeks. But just as iron that has been softened in the fire is hardened again by cold water and its particles forced closely together, so whenever Socrates found his pupil puffed up with vanity and the life of pleasure, he deflated him and rendered him humble and submissive, and Alcibiades was compelled to learn how many his defects were and how far he fell short of perfection.

7. Once, when he was past his boyhood, he went to a schoolmaster and asked him for a volume of Homer. When the teacher said that he had none of Homer’s works, Alcibiades struck him with his fist and went off. Another teacher said that he had a copy of Homer which he had corrected himself. ‘What,’ Alcibiades exclaimed, ‘are you teaching boys to read when you know how to edit Homer? Why aren’t you teaching young men?’

On another occasion when he wished to speak to Pericles he went to his house, but was told Pericles could not receive him, as he was considering how to present his accounts to the people. ‘Would it not be better,’ asked Alcibiades as he came away, ‘if he considered how to avoid presenting accounts to the people at all?’

While he was still in his teens he served in the Potidaean campaign,¹in which he shared a tent with Socrates and took his place next to him in the ranks. There was a fierce battle, in which they both fought with great courage, but when Alcibiades was wounded and fell, it was Socrates who stood over his body and defended him with the most conspicuous bravery and saved his life and his arms from the enemy. The prize for valour was certainly due in all justice to Socrates, but because of the distinction of Alcibiades’ name, the generals were evidently anxious to award it to him. Accordingly, Socrates, who wanted to encourage his friend’s honourable ambitions, took the lead in testifying to Alcibiades’ bravery and in pressing for the crown and the suit of armour to be given to him.

On another occasion, when the battle of Delium had been lost² and the Athenian army routed, Alcibiades, who was then on horseback, caught sight of Socrates with a few other soldiers retreating on foot. He would not ride on, but stayed to escort him, although the enemy were pressing hard and killing many of the Athenians. These events, of course, all belong to a later date.

8. Callias’s father Hipponicus was a man who enjoyed great prestige in Athens, on account both of his family and of his wealth, and Alcibiades once struck him a blow with his fist, not because of any quarrel with him or even out of anger, but simply because he had agreed with some friends to do it as a joke. Very soon the whole of Athens had heard of the outrage and naturally enough it aroused great indignation. Early the next morning Alcibiades went to Hipponicus’s house and knocked at the door. When he was shown in, he took off his cloak and offered his body to Hipponicus to beat and punish as he chose. But Hipponicus put aside his anger and forgave him, and afterwards gave Alcibiades his daughter Hipparete to marry.

There is another story that it was not Hipponicus, but Callias his son, who betrothed Hipparete to Alcibiades and gave her a dowry of ten talents, and that later, when she had a child, Alcibiades extorted a further ten talents from him, making out that this had been the agreement if children were born to them. After this Callias became so afraid that Alcibiades would intrigue against him to get his money, that he gave public notice that in the event of his dying without heirs of his own, his house and his property would be bequeathed to the State.

Hipparete was a virtuous and affectionate wife, but she was outraged by the liaisons her husband continually carried on with Athenian and foreign courtesans, and finally she left his house and went to live with her brother. Alcibiades paid no attention to this and continued his debaucheries, so that she was obliged to lodge her petition for divorce with the magistrate, which she did, not by proxy but in person. When she appeared in public for this purpose, as the law demanded, Alcibiades came up, seized her and carried her home with him through the market-place, and not a soul dared to oppose him or take her from him. In fact she continued to live with him until her death, for she died not long after this, while Alcibiades was on a voyage to Ephesus. I should explain that this violence of his was not regarded as being either inhuman or contrary to the law. Indeed, it would appear that the law, in laying it down that the wife who wishes to separate from her husband must attend the court in person, is actually designed to give the husband the opportunity to meet her and recover her.

9. Alcibiades owned an exceptionally large and handsome dog, which he had bought for seventy minae, and it possessed an extremely fine tail, which he had cut off. His friends scolded him and told him that everyone was angry for the dog’s sake. Alcibiades only laughed and retorted, ‘That is exactly what I wanted. I am quite content for the whole of Athens to chatter about this; it will stop them saying anything worse about me.’

10. His first appearance in public life, it is said, was not an occasion he had planned, but it was connected quite by chance with a voluntary subscription to the state. Alcibiades was passing the Assembly at a moment when there was a sudden burst of loud applause, and he asked what was the cause of the excitement. When he heard that a public subscription was in progress, he went up to the platform and offered a contribution himself. The crowd clapped their hands and cheered with delight, so much so that Alcibiades forgot about a quail which he happened to be carrying under his clock, and the bird took fright and flew away. At this the people shouted all the louder and many of them jumped up to help chase the bird. The man who finally caught it and returned it to him was Antiochus,the pilot, who as a result of this episode later became a close friend of Alcibiades.

Because of Alcibiades’ birth, his wealth, and his personal courage in battle, every door to a public career stood open to him. But although he attracted many friends and followers, he counted above all else on his charm as a speaker to give him a hold over the people. And in fact not only do the comic poets testify that he was a most effective speaker, but the greatest orator Athens ever knew, Demosthenes, refers to Alcibiades in his speech Against Meidias, as a man who spoke with extraordinary power, in addition to his other gifts. If we can believe Theophrastus, who is the most diligent in research and the best informed in historical matters of all the philosophers, Alcibiades possessed in a higher degree than any of his contemporaries the faculty of discerning and grasping what was required in a given situation. However, as he strove to find not merely the right thing to say, but also the proper words and phrases in which to clothe his thoughts, and as he did not have a large command of vocabulary, he would often hesitate in the middle of his speech, and even stop dead and pause while the necessary phrase eluded him, and then he would start again with great caution.

The Sicilian Expedition [415-413 B.C.]

Where there is hubris and self-will, know this:

The city, after a fair voyage, in time will plunge to the bottom.

—Sophocles

PEACE CAME TOO SOON FOR ONE AMBITIOUS YOUNG ATHENIAN. Alcibiades had just turned thirty, old enough at last to take his rightful place among Athens’ generals and civic leaders. Peacetime robbed him of his chances to shine in battle, exploit a great crisis, or pose as the savior of Athens. Happily for him, the Spartans were unwilling or unable to abide by the terms of the Peace of Nicias. So Alcibiades set out to stir up trouble among the Greeks, like a boy shoving a long stick into a hornet’s nest.

Even without his incendiary policies, Alcibiades’ flamboyant behavior and mannerisms kept him always in the public eye. The comic poets of Athens ruthlessly mimicked Alcibiades’ idiosyncratic lisp and hesitant speech. He enjoyed the glory of seeing his four-horse chariots take first, second, and fourth place at the Olympic games. Even more than his sporting victories, Alcibiades’ sexual adventures fascinated the Athenians. Far from hiding his erotic obsessions, Alcibiades went so far as to replace the traditional family crest on his shield with an image of the god Eros standing on a field of gold, wielding a thunderbolt. His marriage to the richest heiress in Athens did nothing to stop his scandalous escapades. When she sought a divorce, he seized her from the court and carried her home again through the crowds in the Agora.

Like all rich Athenians he had served the city as a trierarch, and his outrageous behavior carried over to the decks of his triremes. Alcibiades ordered the ship’s carpenters to cut away sections of the stern decks so that his bed could be slung on ropes in the gap. No hard pallets for Alcibiades. He slept as if rocking in a cradle, the first recorded swinging of a hammock on a ship at sea. His steersman, a citizen named Antiochus, was befriended on the strength of nothing more than a prank in the Assembly. One day a pet quail escaped from under Alcibiades’ cloak when he lifted his hands to applaud a speech. Antiochus happened to be standing nearby. He won Alcibiades’ eternal regard by recapturing the bird following a noisy chase through the ranks of laughing citizens.

The fragile Peace of Nicias needed constant nurture if it was to survive, but the Athenians instead gave Alcibiades free rein in his provocative ventures abroad. So long as he did not violate the letter of the peace with a direct attack on Spartan territory, they supported all his schemes. Summer after summer this ambitious and charismatic young general set out with Athenian fleets to aid anybody opposed to the Spartans.

Alcibiades was good at impulsive beginnings, but all his projects had a way of fizzling out in the end. His character lacked the steadiness to push any enterprise through to completion. Even so, the trouble that he caused was enough to win congratulations from the famous misanthrope Timon of Athens. This eccentric hater of his fellow citizens seized Alcibiades’ hand after one Assembly session and told him, “Well done! Keep this up and you will ruin them all!”

Five years after the signing of the Peace of Nicias, envoys from Segesta in Sicily arrived in Athens. The Segestan envoys asked that Athens send its navy to settle a squabble that involved the powerful Sicilian city of Syracuse. As a makeweight argument they threw in a fresh appeal from the Sicilians of Leontini, old allies of the Athenians, who had been expelled from their city by the Syracusans. Athens had already made one unsuccessful attempt to help the people of Leontini, and at least one veteran of that first Sicilian expedition, the general Eurymedon, could attest to the uselessness of another. Nevertheless the Assembly sent a delegation to find out the facts about Segesta. They returned with reports of a wealthy city along with sixty silver talents as a gift from the Segestans. It was enough money to pay the crews of sixty triremes for a month.

The veterans of the recent war with the Peloponnesians opposed new military undertakings, but younger Athenians took a different view. Their city and navy had emerged from the ten years’ war unscathed. The treasury was filling up again. They longed for great enterprises worthy of Athens’ power and glory. Even the dreary turn of events in Greece played its part. After they conquered Sicily, might they not finally subdue the Peloponnesians and make themselves masters of the entire Greek world?

In response to the appeal of the Segestan envoys, the Assembly voted to send a fleet of sixty triremes to Sicily, led by a team of generals that would include Alcibiades. A second debate was convened when Nicias urged the Athenians to change their minds while there was still time. When Alcibiades made a fervent plea that the Assembly stick to its resolve, Nicias tried to scare the citizens into abandoning the scheme. With a great show of concern he deliberately exaggerated the numbers and costs needed to win such a war. But his ploy backfired. The Athenians reaffirmed the decision to send out the expedition but also vastly increased its scope. Nicias himself, no more in control of this meeting than he had been at the debate with Cleon over Pylos, was cornered into specifying the excessive numbers that he deemed would guarantee safety and success.

The Athenians threw themselves into the preparation of the armada with feverish enthusiasm. Anyone not employed in fitting out the fleet congregated in the wrestling schools or stood on street corners in eager conversation. Those who knew Sicily used the tips of their walking sticks and drew maps of the island on the ground for their more ignorant friends. Sicily was three-cornered, and it was easy to pinpoint Syracuse on the side of the triangle closest to Athens. There was Italy! And there was Africa! Down in the sand at their feet it all looked so close, so small, so possible.

An outburst of religious piety thickened the atmosphere of runaway patriotism. Athenian oracle-mongers retailed prophecies that foreshadowed the destiny of Athens to conquer Sicily. During these days of preparation the sacred trireme Ammonias returned to the Piraeus from Africa bearing a favorable prophecy from the oracle at Siwa in the Egyptian desert. Zeus Ammon assured Alcibiades that the Athenians would capture all the Syracusans. Even the gods seemed to be urging the people forward.

Committed now to the expedition as one of its generals, Nicias worked with Alcibiades to arrange for a departure ceremony that would beggar description. As showy in his sanctimonious way as Alcibiades himself, Nicias had once paid builders to contrive an extraordinary pontoon bridge of gilded and tapestried ships for a festival. The occasion was the great musical competition of choirs that drew Athenians and other Ionians across the sea to the sanctuary of Apollo on Delos. Normally the choirboys, pipers, and chorus masters disembarked on the island in an undignified scramble. On the occasion when Nicias was sponsor, the chorus of young Athenians caused a sensation when they paraded in stately array across the bridge of boats, singing as they came. His love of lavish spectacle now guided the plans to give the great armada a spectacular send-off.

Some citizens did oppose the venture. In the open Assembly they knew the majority would call them unpatriotic if they raised their hands and voted no, so they remained silent in public. The astronomer Meton, famous for devising the nineteen-year cycle of the official Athenian calendar, secretly set a fire that destroyed his own house. Thorugh this domestic disaster he hoped to render his son exempt from service as a trierarch.

When the launching of the fleet was only a few days off, the city was shaken by the most terrible act of sacrilege in its history. One morning the Athenians awoke to find that parties unknown had mutilated the stone herms that stood outside every house and temple. These phallic statues represented the god Hermes, guardian of travelers and promoter of prosperous journeys. Apparently a well-organized gang of men had passed through the city streets by night, knocking off stone noses and genitals. The perpetrators, whoever they might be, failed to stop the armada from setting out, but their vandalism spread a cloud over the entire expedition.

The mutilation of the herms threw the city into an uproar. An investigation was launched to find the desecrators. Alcibiades’ escapades now came back to haunt him as, with sublime illogic, many Athenians made him their chief target of suspicion. Alcibiades, eager to depart, indignantly proclaimed his innocence, but the Assembly reserved the right to call him back to Athens should evidence of his guilt appear. This burden of suspicion would inevitably weaken his prestige in dealing with his two colleagues, Nicias and Lamachus. The latter general was well known for having led two Athenian squadrons into the Black Sea. The people had assigned him to the Sicilian expedition in the hope of curbing Alcibiades’ wilder impulses, while providing Nicias with some much-needed backbone.

The great armada finally set out on a midsummer morning. Before dawn the population of Athens was on the move, pouring down to the Piraeus to watch the departure of the ships. Families clustered around husbands and sons who were departing into the unknown. From docks and housetops the Athenians gazed out at a floating city, an entire community packed on board ships. The trierarchs had vied with one another in paint and gilding. Now the triremes shone resplendent in the sunlight, seeming more ready for a parade than for combat.

The dazzling hulls made it easy to overlook the hollowness within. The crews and fighting men were inexperienced in combat. So great was the city’s maritime supremacy that its navy cruised the seas unchallenged. During the recent war with the Peloponnesians only small squadrons had been called on to fight the enemy. And as leaders from Themistocles to Sophocles had observed, the strength of a navy lay not in its ships but in its men.

When all were on board, the ships rowed out to their appointed places on the harbor’s oval of blue water. Then the trumpeter sounded a signal. Immediately the multitude fell silent. A herald began to cry out the hymns and prayers for the launching of ships. To each line of the herald’s chant, all the people responded in chorus. The generals and trierarchs then poured their libations into the sea from goblets of silver and gold. The leading trireme moved toward the mouth of the harbor, and in a majestic procession the ships fell into line behind it. Once clear of the Cantharus the triremes spurted off at high speed, racing toward Aegina as if the expedition were no more than a regatta. The people watched the hulls disappear over the southern horizon, then returned to their homes to wait for news of victory.

Over the next few days the fleet circumnavigated the Peloponnese without incident. Not until they joined the advance contingent at Corcyra did the Athenians realize that a gigantic force can be its own worst enemy. The same logistical difficulties that had once beset Xerxes now confronted the imperial navy of Athens. Their numbers were so vast that they might, like the Persian host of old, “drink the rivers dry.” Nowhere on the voyage ahead would the Athenians find ports big enough to hold all their ships or supply their hordes of men. The great fleet had to be divided into three squadrons, with a general at the head of each.

In successive waves they crossed over to Italy. Many western Greek cities, alarmed by the number of ships, refused to let them land at all. Even places supposedly friendly to Athens kept their gates barred and their markets shut, providing no more than permission to land and take on water. Too late the Athenians realized that their expedition should have been preceded by a serious effort to build up a league of allies pledged to join the attack on Syracuse.

Their frustrations reached a climax at Rhegium on the Strait of Messina, an ancient ally that also refused to support the invasion. There the Athenians met the envoys with the three triremes that had been sent ahead to collect the promised money from Segesta, the money that was to cover the immense costs of the expedition. The envoys had their own tale of woe, and it was a most embarrassing one for the Athenians. The actual sum possessed by the Segestans was only thirty talents of silver, barely enough to pay the crews for seven or eight days. How had the first mission been so deceived?

The truth was soon revealed. The wretched Segestans, knowing that the Athenians would help them only if they appeared to be rich, tricked the members of the first mission with lavish dinners and seemingly limitless displays of gold and silver vessels. In fact, the Segestans had only a single set of expensive cups, bowls, and plates. Even this set had been pieced together by borrowing from neighboring Greek and Phoenician cities, who were certainly in on the joke. The glittering table service was secretly passed from house to house, always arriving at the kitchen door before the Athenians arrived for their next diplomatic dinner. The ruse had convinced the visiting envoys that even ordinary Segestans had huge fortunes.

This disastrous news led to a split among the three Athenian generals. Nicias recommended that they fulfill their original mission and leave the sixty fast triremes to aid Segesta against its enemies. The rest of the armada could then parade ceremonially around the shores of Sicily in a show of naval power before going home. Alcibiades dismissed this proposal as disgraceful. He advocated a campaign of diplomacy from city to city. When they had won over enough allies, the Athenians could attack and subdue Syracuse. The third and least prestigious general, Lamachus, had the sound est instincts. He urged an immediate assault on Syracuse before the city could organize its defenses. As this seasoned veteran knew, it was not only in Aesop’s fables that familiarity bred contempt.

Finding that neither of his colleagues would listen to him, Lamachus broke the deadlock by favoring Alcibiades’ plan of winning new allies through diplomacy. First, however, the Athenians planned a visit to Syracuse itself. In the Great Harbor they would deliver a warning to the city and justify Athens’ actions to the world.

Syracuse had of course never attacked Athens. On the contrary, the Syracusans took Athens as their model for democratic government, freedom of thought, grand public works, and inventiveness. Their city resembled Athens as it had been in the time before the Persian Wars: a place of great but as yet unrealized potential. Syracuse even had its own Themistocles in the person of a visionary and patriotic citizen named Hermocrates.

While the bulk of the Athenian fleet remained at Rhegium, Alcibiades led the sixty fast triremes down the coast in single file, an intimidating array spread out against the skyline. When they reached Syracuse, the ten leading triremes rowed straight into the Great Harbor and took up a position within hailing distance of the city walls. The herald proclaimed that the Athenians had come to restore freedom to their Sicilian allies. All those in Syracuse who favored this cause should leave the city and join the Athenians.

No one from the city answered the Athenian herald. An eerie silence prevailed. As far as the Athenians could see, the Syracusans had no navy and were not prepared to withstand a siege. Nonetheless the sheer scale of the place was overwhelming. The Great Harbor was an irregular oval more than two miles long and a mile broad, big enough to swallow all three of the Piraeus harbors. On the western shore lay reedy wetlands; elsewhere rocky flats shelved into the water. The only good mooring facilities for triremes were the city’s well-protected dockyards, one facing into the Great Harbor and the other facing the open sea.

Having surveyed the enemy’s stronghold, Alcibiades led the Athenian fleet northward and set up a new base at Catana, near the forbidding cone of Mount Etna. The rest of the armada joined them there for the winter. As long as the fair weather lasted, Alcibiades led squadrons up and down the coast on raids to secure new funds or new friends. Returning to Catana after one of these excursions, Alcibiades found that the sacred trireme Salaminia had arrived with orders recalling him to Athens. The investigation into the mutilation of the herms had exploded into a welter of related and unrelated inquiries, and the Assembly wanted Alcibiades for questioning.

SYRACUSE

THE SICILIAN EXPEDITION, 415-413 B.C.

He went peacefully, leaving Nicias and Lamachus in charge of the expedition. At one of the landing places on the Italian coast, however, Alcibiades eluded the crew of the Salaminia and disappeared. Convinced now of his guilt, the Athenians at home condemned their scandalous general to death. When word of the sentence reached him, Alcibiades said only, “I shall show them that I am still alive.” He soon sought refuge in Sparta, one of the few safe places for an Athenian outlaw, and offered the Spartans advice on how they might defeat his native city.

With Alcibiades no longer sharing command of the fleet in Sicily, Lamachus was able to bring Nicias briefly to life. Luring the Syracusan army overland to Catana by means of a false report, Nicias and Lamachus loaded their own troops onto the triremes and raced down the coast to the Great Harbor, where they landed unopposed. Before the Syracusans discovered the ruse and returned, Athenian carpenters and shipwrights had chopped down trees and built a stockade to protect the triremes. The next day, amid crashing thunder, lightning, and rain, the Athenians defeated the Syracusan army in a battle near the city walls. But the appearance of the enemy cavalry prevented the Athenian hoplites from gaining a decisive victory. They had no choice but to return to Catana. More optimistic now, Nicias and Lamachus sent a letter to the Assembly with a report on the expedition’s first campaigning season and an appeal for more horsemen and money.

The workmen in the camp at Catana spent the winter making bricks and implements of iron. The Athenians were preparing to surround Syracuse with a siege wall on land and a blockade of ships at sea. Meanwhile Nicias entered into secret communication with pro-Athenian Syracusans who seemed ready to open the gates, once they convinced the other citizens that resistance was futile. With more battles like the one just fought in the Great Harbor, and more help from Syracusan turncoats, the generals hoped for a speedy end to their mission.