Page:History of Greece Vol VIII.djvu/335

 EEATft OF ALKIBIADES. 3U whom they were intended. His restless character, enterprise, and capacity, were so well known as to raise exaggerated fears as well as exaggerated hopes. Not merely Cyrus, but the Lacedaemonians, closely allied with Cyrus, and the dekadarchies, whom Lysander had set up in the Asiatic Grecian cities, and who held their power only through Lacedaemonian support, all were uneasy at the prospect of seeing Alkibiades again in action and command, amidst so many unsettled elements. Nor can we doubt that the exiles whom these dekadarchies had banished, and the disaffected citizens who remained at home under their ,_ government in fear of banishment or death, kept up correspond- ence with him, and looked to him as a probable liberator. Moreover, the Spartan king, Agis, still retained the same per- sonal antipathy against him, which had already some years before procured the order to be despatched, from Sparta to Asia, to assassinate him. Here are elements enough, of hostility, ven- geance, and apprehension, afloat against Alkibiades, without believing the story of Plutarch, that Ivritias and the Thirty sent to apprize Lysander that the oligarchy at Athens could not stand, 60 long as Alkibiades was alive. The truth is, that though the Thirty had included him in the list of exiles, 1 they had much less to dread from his assaults or plots, in Attica, than the Lysan- drian dekadarchies in the cities of Asia. Moreover, his name was not popular even among the Athenian democrats, as will be shown hereafter, when we come to recount the trial of Sokrates. Probably, therefore, the alleged intervention of Kritias and the Thirty, to procure the murder of Alkibiades, is a fiction of the subsequent encomiasts of the latter at Athens, in order to create for him claims to esteem as a friend and fellow-sufferer with the democracy. A special despatch, or skytale, was sent out by the Spartan authorities to Lysander in Asia, enjoining him to procure that Alkibiades should be put to death. Accordingly, Lysander com- municated this order to Pharnabazus, within whose satrapy Alkibiades was residing, and requested tlmt it might be put in execution. The whole character of Pharnabazus shows that ha ' Xcnoph. Hcllen. ii, 3, 42 ; Isokratcs, Or. xvi, DC Bigis. s. 46. VOL. VIII. 14