countrymen and the
prospects of his recall. When at length their good disposition seemed
to him established, not only by his election as general, but by the
messages of invitation which he received in private from his friends, he
sailed home, and entered Piraeus on the very day of the festival of the
Plunteria, (3) when the statue of Athena is veiled and screened from
public gaze. This was a coincidence, as some thought, of evil omen,
and unpropitious alike to himself and the State, for no Athenian would
transact serious business on such a day.

(2) Gytheum, the port and arsenal of Sparta, situated near the head of
the Laconian Gulf (now Marathonisi).

(3) {ta Plunteria}, or feast of washings, held on the 25th of the
month Thargelion, when the image of the goddess Athena was
stripped in order that her clothes might be washed by the
Praxiergidae; neither assembly nor court was held on that day, and
the Temple was closed.

As he sailed into the harbour, two great crowds--one from the Piraeus,
the other from the city (4)--flocked to meet the vessels. Wonderment,
mixed with a desire to see Alcibiades, was the prevailing sentiment of
the multitude. Of him they spoke: some asserting that he was the best
of citizens, and that in his sole instance banishment had been
ill-deserved. He had been the victim of plots, hatched in the brains
of people less able than himself, however much they might excel in
pestilent speech; men whose one principle of statecraft was to look to
their private gains; whereas this man's policy had ever been to uphold
the common weal, as much by his private means as by all the power of the
State. His own choice, eight years ago, when the charge of impiety in
the matter of the mysteries was still fresh, would have been to submit
to trial at once. It was his personal foes, who had succeeded in
postponing that undeniably just procedure; who waited till his back was
turned, and then robbed him of his fatherland. Then it was that, being
made the very slave of circumstance, he was driven to court the men he
hated most; and at a time when his own life was in daily peril, he must
see his dearest friends and fellow-citizens, nay, the very State itself,
bent on a suicidal course, and yet, in the exclusion of exile, be unable
to lend a helping hand. "It is not men of this stamp," they averred,
"who desire changes in affairs and revolution: had he not already
guaranteed to him by the Democracy