History of the Peloponnesian War

Now among those who held control at Samos,[*](Those elected leaders in ch. lxxvi.) Thrasybulus, after he had effected the revolution, always held very strongly to the same opinion, that they should recall Alcibiades, and finally in a meeting of the assembly he won the majority of the soldiers to his view. And when these had passed a resolution recalling Alcibiades and granting him immunity, he sailed across to Tissaphernes and brought Alcibiades back to Samos, thinking that their only salvation was to convert Tissaphernes from the Peloponnesian side to their own.

Accordingly, an assembly was held, in which Alcibiades complained with much lamentation of his personal misfortune in being exiled; he also spoke at length on matters of state, inspiring in them no slight hopes regarding the future, and went on to magnify to excess his own influence with Tissaphernes. His object was that those who were in control of the oligarchy at home should fear him and that the political clubs which conspired against him should more surely be broken up; also that the army at Samos should hold him in greater honour and feel a greater degree of confidence themselves; and finally that the enemy should be filled with all possible suspicions of Tissaphernes and so deprived of their present hopes. Accordingly, Alcibiades in a spirit of boasting went on and made these great promises:

that Tissaphernes had solemnly pledged to him that, if he could but trust the Athenians, so long as he had anything left of his own they should not lack subsistence, no, not even if in the end he had to sell his own bed; and that he would bring the Phoenician ships, which were already at Aspendus, and deliver them to the Athenians and not to the Peloponnesians; but, he had added, he could place confidence in the Athenians only on condition that he, Alcibiades, should be restored in safety and become surety to him.

As they heard these and many other promises, they not only elected Alcibiades general without delay, to act with the generals already in office, but also entrusted to him all their affairs; and there was not a man of them that would have exchanged for anything his present hopes both of his own safety and of having revenge upon the Four Hundred, and they were ready at that moment both to despise their present enemies on the strength of the words they had heard and to sail to the attack of Peiraeus.

But Alcibiades roundly objected to their leaving behind them their nearer enemies and sailing against the Peiraeus, though many insisted upon that course; his first business, he said, since he had been elected general, would be to sail to Tissaphernes and arrange with him the conduct of the war.

So after this assembly he at once went away to Tissaphernes, in order that he might be thought to be in communication with him about everything; at the same time he wished to be held in greater honour by him and to show him that he had now been elected general and was therefore in a position to do him either good or evil. And thus it fell out that Alcibiades was merely using Tissaphernes to frighten the Athenians and the Athenians to frighten Tissaphernes.

When the Peloponnesians at Miletus heard of the recall of Alcibiades, although they were before this distrustful of Tissaphernes, they were now filled with a still greater suspicion of him.

For they had had this experience of him, that after they had refused to go out against the Athenians and fight when these made their advance against Miletus, Tissaphernes became far more slack in the matter of giving them their pay and thus intensified the hatred in which even before these events he was held by them on account of Alcibiades.

So the soldiers would gather in groups, as had been their wont—and not the soldiery only, but also some of the others, who were men of consideration—and would cast up their accounts with one another, proving that they had never yet received their pay in full, but that what was given was short and even that not paid regularly; and they declared that unless they were either to have a decisive battle or get away to some place where they could get subsistence the crews would desert the ships; and for all this, they held, Astyochus was to blame, because he bore with Tissaphernes' whims for the sake of his private gain.